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By the time of this second volume of the third Dune prequel trilogy, battles and plagues have nearly destroyed humans and their planets. Sheanna revives the ghola cloning project to pit genius against numbers. Almost all the saga principals have been re-created—Paul, Jessica, Letos I and II, Chani, Stilgar, even Wellington Yueh and Baron Harkonnen—and are hiding on the no-ship. The eleventh ghola of Duncan Idaho keeps an eye on things. Naturally, such a crew generates intrigue, dissension, and many actions unintentionally at cross-purposes. Some of the re-creations learn from the past, some don't. Meanwhile, Omnius and Erasmus, leaders of the thinking machines, search for the no-ship; failing to find it, they finish the destruction of any planet capable of supporting human life. When the clones and the thinking machines finally confront each other, the conflict proves pretty gripping. Its plot derived from Frank Herbert's notes, Sandworms should fascinate Dune fans. The series' long run by now begs the question of whether, since Sandworms ties up so many loose ends, more of what has been learned about the construction and destruction of ecologies, and about thinking machines, in the 42 years since Dune was first published couldn't figure in the promised ninth prequel volume, Paul of Dune. Murray, Frieda
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Review
'Hight's stirring book is brimming with all the excitement, action, romance and adventure that readers would expect from a tale set in the turmoil of the Crusades - but it is also an eye-opening window on to the sophistication and complexity of Islamic life in the late Middle Ages and a superb early portrait of one of history's most fascinating characters' -- Lancashire Evening Post 'Hight has used his skills as an historian ... to build a framework of solid historical fact on which he builds his exciting tale. And exciting it is ... lively and a real page-turner, but what makes it special is that shining through is his deep knowledge of the Arabic culture ... promising and compelling' -- Eastern Daily Press 'Epic is the word to sum up this thundering historical adventure which begins Hight's ambitious new Saladin trilogy' -- Peterborough Evening Telegraph 'Exciting and interesting' -- HNR
Product Description
Salah ad-Din, or Saladin as he is known to the Franks, was a Kurd, the son of a despised people, and yet he became Sultan of Egypt and Syria. He united the peoples of Allah, recaptured Jerusalem, and drove the Crusaders to the very edge of the sea. He battled, and in the end tamed King Richard the Lionheart, who well deserved his savage name. He was a great man, the greatest man that I ever knew, but when I first met him, he was only a skinny child...- The Chronicle of Yahya al-Dimashq But alongside the legend of Saladin there is another story. When the Crusader army is routed beneath the walls of Damascus in 1148, a young Saxon named John is captured and enslaved. He is bought by Yusuf, a slight, bookish boy, for the price of a pair of sandals. And so begins the story of two enemies brought together by fate and of a friendship that will change the face of the Holy Land. Timid Yusuf will grow up to become the warrior Saladin, nicknamed 'the Eagle'; John will first teach his young master the art of war, before returning west to serve first the King of Jerusalem and then King Richard himself. From spectacular set-piece battles to the political manoeuvrings of the corrupt Crusader court, from the brutality of single combat to the sophistication of Islamic life, this is the first in a remarkable trilogy that will chart the story of the greatest leader the Middle East has ever known.
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Review
"An exciting adventure into a 'what if' world. A brilliant work of creative imagination, one that rivals in conception, scope, and execution of plot Jean Auel's bestselling novels."
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About 65 million years ago, it is supposed that dinosaurs disappeared from Earth. But what if they had not been?
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Harry Harrison, an acknowledged master of imaginative fiction, broke new ground with West of Eden. He brought to vivid life the world as it might have been, where dinosaurs survived, where their intelligent descendants challenged humans for mastery of Earth, where a young hunter named Kerrick grew among the dinosaurs and rose to become their most feared enemy. Now, the awesome saga continues in Winter in Eden... A new ice age threatens Earth. Facing extinction, the dinosaurs must employ their mastery of biology to swiftly reconquer human territory. Desperately, Kerrick launches an arduous quest to rally a final defense for humankind. With his beloved wife and young son, he heads north to the land of the whale hunters, east into the enemy's stronghold, and south to a fateful reckoning with destiny. Not since Dune has there been a work of such majestic scope and conception -- a monumental epic of passion, courage, and triumph.<
From Library Journal
The conflict between the human Tanu and the reptilian Yilane reaches a climax as the two implacable enemies face each other in a battle for the destinies of their races. Harrison's conclusion to his alternate prehistory of Earth excels in its detailed depiction of an alien civilization that might have been. Recommended where the series is popular. JC Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Product Description
The rousing conclusion of an epic trilogy! In WEST OF EDEN and WINTER IN EDEN, master novelist Harry Harrison broke new ground with his most ambitious project ever. He brought to vivid life the world as it might have been, where dinosaurs survived, where their intelligent descendants, the Yilane, challenged humans for mastery of the Earth, and where the human Kerrick, a young hunter of the Tanu tribe, grew among the dinosaurs and rose to become their most feared enemy. Now, in RETURN TO EDEN, Harrison brings the epic trilogy to a stunning conclusion. After Kerrick rescues his people from the warlike Yilane, they find a safe haven on an island and there begin to rebuild their shattered lives. But with fierce predators stalking the forests, how long can these unarmed human outeasts hope to survive? And, of course, Kerrick cannot forget Vainte, his implacable Yilane enemy. She's been cast out from her kind, under sentence of death, but how long will her banishment last? For her strange attraction to Kerrick has turned into a halred even more powerful than her instinets - an obsession that compels her to hunt down Kerrick and kill him.
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SUMMARY:
The sequel to Bridge of Birds and The Story of the Stone, this fantasy tale is the equivalent of Holmes and Watson in an ancient China that never was. Master Li and Number Ten Ox investigate a strange case of murder in a book that is equal parts Chinese folklore, sly parody, adventure, horror and fun.<
This volume of Del Rey’s collections of the works of the creator of Conan the Destroyer contains the adventures of Texan Francis Xavier Gordon, known as El Borak, who fights outlaws, messianic madmen, and other deadly opponents in Afghanistan and the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s; and of Texas Irishman Kirby O’Donnell in the same region and time. Written for the pulps, only about half these yarns saw print before Howard died. They’re action-packed adventures, whose only supernatural elements lie in the area’s hostile geography and ancient ruins. Howard’s reportorial prose very well suits depicting a land where life is cheap, blood flows at a wrong word, and loners’ only feelings are for comradeship and honor. A must for Howard completists, this volume should also attract anyone interested in American popular culture and the use of the Middle East in American popular fiction. The notes to El Borak mention several analogous authors. --Frieda Murray
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Layne Prescott meets a strange man in a Shanghai airport and ends up carrying a mysterious briefcase with an attached wrist shackle home with him. Once back in his hometown, Layne’s world spirals out of control. Each day at precisely 11:23, the small town erupts into violent chaos. Surrounded by a strict military quarantine, Layne and his friends wait with dread as the clock ticks downward.<
When Lacey McHenry accepts a prestigious research fellowship at the world-renowned Kendell-Jakes Longevity Institute, she sees it as a new start on life. But a disturbing late-night encounter with an intruder leads to an unexpected cover-up by Institute authorities, and she soon realizes there's more going on than she ever imagined. She finds a supporter in genetics researcher Cameron Reinhardt. However, Reinhardt is a favorite of the Institute's director, and she can't help wondering if he, too, is in on the cover-up. The brilliant but absentminded researcher turns out to have his own secrets, some of them dark and deadly. The Enclave is characterized by adventure, intrigue, spiritual analogy, and romance, all set in an unusual but fully realized world—one that may have its foundations on earth but which, the more one learns of it, doesn't seem much like the earth we know at all.<
Review
[The conclusion] to one of the most ambitious fictional cycles in American literature...[Harington] writes elegantly of a time gone by, and of people whom, in real life, time would have forgotten...Elegiac and complex a feast of Southerly words that will please Harington's many admirers. --Kirkus Reviews
Donald Harington is one of the most powerful subtle and inventive novelists in America --The Washington Post
He is our Chaucer, and Enduring is Harington at his brilliant, idiosyncratic best. --Ron Rash
About the Author
Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother’s hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by storytellers. His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he has been lecturing for twenty-one years. His first novel, The Cherry Pit, was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published fourteen other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists. He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. In 2006, he was awarded the inaugural Oxford American award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. He has been called “an undiscovered continent” (Fred Chappell) and “America’s Greatest Unknown Novelist” (Entertainment Weekly).
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When the abused decide to fight back, the abuser's world might just shatter. Lauren Covington's family maintains a grand facade that belies the life they live behind closed doors. Alex Covington, Lauren's father, keeps a tight rein on his family through dominance, abuse, and obsessive control. Consequently, Lauren doesn't believe she could ever trust a man, much less fall in love with one. When Lauren meets Jesse Ryder, her carefully constructed protective wall shatters. She falls hopelessly and completely in love. It's only fitting that Jesse is a private detective who had once worked for her father, had defied him, and was now the subject of Alex Covington's wrath. Amidst devastating loss, betrayal, and her father's destructive pursuit of Jesse, Lauren finds the trust and love she had always longed for.
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From Publishers Weekly
Adeptly balancing a concern for harsh and complicated realities with a boundless talent for the fantastical, Hancock, author of popular history works such as the bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods, has created a fantasy realm where an epic struggle is underway. Two teenaged girls living 24,000 years apart are tasked by a beneficent being with putting a stop to the evil force embodied in Sulpa, a demon who has amassed a terrifying force of Stone Age warriors to carry out his plans. Central to these is the destruction of the Neanderthals, who here are spiritually superior beings with telepathic and healing powers. Hancock's draw on real anthropological and archaeological information is grounding and invigorating, and his supernatural additions are both internally coherent and satisfyingly trippy; one central premise is that out-of-body states such as those induced by certain drugs can actually transport one to other (real) dimensions and times. The march of endless cliffhangers is somewhat tiring, though, and one hopes that the simplistic portrayal of good and evil will be complicated in sequels, as it contributes to a fatiguing effect. Otherwise, Hancock has more than enough mythos, character, and tension to propel two further installments. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review
"Adeptly balancing a concern for harsh and complicated realities with a boundless talent for the fantastical, Hancock, author of popular history works such as the bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods, has created a fantasy realm where an epic struggle is underway.... Hancock's draw on real anthropological and archaeological information is grounding and invigorating, and his supernatural additions are both internally coherent and satisfyingly trippy." - Publishers Weekly
This latest entry in Hogan's popular Giants series ( Inherit the Stars , etc.) begins a year after humans on earth first make contact with the peaceful, advanced, nonhuman Ganymeans, who exerted a hitherto unknown but momentous influence on the development of Homo sapiens. Following the discovery that the humans of Jevlen had been tampering deleteriously with earth history, the Ganymeans turned off the Jevlenese super - computer JEVEX. When the Ganymean supervisor of Jevlen finds violence and irrationality increasing, with leaders of exotic cults demanding the return of JEVEX, he calls on physicist Victor Hunt to discover the cause. Meanwhile, on the world of Waroth, where science is unknown, famine reigns as the magic that once created plentitude now ebbs away. Hunt and his assistants find a mysterious link among the cult leaders, JEVEX and Waroth that partially explains the Jevlenese's hostility toward earth. While Hogan's scientific material can be of interest, his one-dimensional characters and sketchy portrayal of nonhuman society make the novel rather dull overall. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Scientist Victor Hunt and journalist Gina Marin join a small group of humans selected by an alien race of benevolent giants--the Ganymeans--to investigate the planet Jevlin, where a malfunctioning computer poses a danger to continued peaceful relations between that planet and Earth. Set in the same universe as Inherit the Stars (Ballantine, 1978), The Gentle Giants of Ganymede (Ballantine, 1986), and Giants' Star (Ballantine, 1986), Hogan's latest novel focuses primarily on ideas, leaving its characters curiously devoid of personal appeal. Despite some intriguing looks at physics and alternate realities, this novel is recommended only where previous series titles have a following. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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