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A week after a cyber-attack crippled America’s power grid, millions are dead—frozen by the worst winter storm in a century, irradiated by exploding nuclear power plants, or murdered by ruthless criminals. Millions more starve and battle for survival amidst the ever-worsening conditions. Despite the long odds, ex-cop Nate Bauer is determined to do whatever it takes to reach his pregnant wife and family in Chicago. Joining him on this perilous journey is fifteen-year-old Dakota, a young prepper on a mission to find her uncle. Braving the frozen wastes of Illinois, however, may be the least of their worries, since the road to salvation runs directly through the heart of America’s most dangerous city.<

October 1913 and the St Vincent is in Portsmouth harbour, where four midshipmen have come to the end of their first two-year cruise. Called to Captain Ironside’s cabin, they learn their fate. Three are made sublieutenant, the fourth is pushed out of the Navy, a failure. There was no tolerance in the Royal Navy for weaklings and incompetents who failed to master the basics. They were beaten for every infraction of the rules of seamanship, encouraging them to conform or to get out. Adams, born to the elite, is made sublieutenant and posted to Iron Duke, flagship of the Grand Fleet, and the latest and largest of superdreadnoughts. McDuff goes to Good Hope cruiser bound for the South Atlantic. An old ship, and he had hoped for better, but there were chances to specialise on an armoured cruiser. Sturton, able and slightly maverick, hoped to be sent to another battleship where he could become a gunnery specialist, but instead goes to Sheldrake, a destroyer joining the Mediterranean Fleet. Destroyers were wet, cold, and uncomfortable, but it could be the making of his career. Baker, the failure, had never fit in. He came from the wrong background and was ostracised aboard ship, left on his own to survive the best he could. Rejected by the Navy, he is forced to join the Territorial Army or be disowned by his rich, vulgar father. Nineteen years of age and dumped on the scrapheap. War comes in August and the four young men meet its challenges in surprising ways.<

John Mack, a prepper and former soldier, struggles to save his family and community after an EMP takes out the country’s electrical grid. With most electronics, communications and transportation destroyed in a matter of seconds, the nation quickly collapses into anarchy. For John and the other residents of Willow Creek Drive, the breakdown of social order throws them back to the 1800s. As the community tries to come together, a powerful outside force appears that threatens their survival. Will John’s years of military and prepping experience be enough to keep them safe? Mixing tons of useful prepping tips into an action-packed story, Last Stand: Surviving America’s Collapse is a must-read for any fans of survival fiction.<

Three months after the EMP cripples the United States, John Mack and his family find their peaceful new existence shattered when a tyrant seizes control of the nearby town of Oneida. Charles Augustus Morgan is a presidential envoy, sent to restore law and order to the area. But his first order of business is to demand the confiscation of all firearms from the local population. Morgan’s offer is as ugly as the man himself: disarm or die. When John and his family get caught in the middle, the threat jeopardizes everything they’ve struggled to rebuild. Soon John encounters a group of Patriots who’ve sworn to stand against Morgan’s growing despotism. But John will learn that nothing in this new post-EMP America is what it seems—and that the deadliest threats are often the ones you didn’t see coming.<

Tormented by a past he can’t forget, John Mack is about to face the toughest fight of his life. The tiny town of Oneida, Tennessee, still reeling from the Chairman’s violent overthrow, stands in the crosshairs of Russian and Chinese armies threatening to push across the Mississippi river. With the United States fragmented and on the brink of military collapse, John will need to dig deeper than ever to defend his loved ones from enemies both foreign and domestic.<

In spite of Oneida’s heroic stand against the Chinese, foreign armies are poised along the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, preparing for the final assault. America’s defeat is inevitable. For John, turning the tide will mean going deep behind enemy lines and organizing the sort of insurgency he fought so hard against in Iraq. But more than that, it’ll mean coming to terms with the brutality of war and the realization that sometimes the deepest scars are the ones that can’t be seen.<

In a near future Tokyo, every action—from blinking to sexual intercourse—is intellectual property owned by corporations that charge licensing fees. A BodyBank computer system implanted in each citizen records their movements from moment to moment, and connects them to the audio-visual overlay of the ImmaNet, so that every inch of this cyber-dystopian metropolis crawls with information and shifting cinematic promotainment.<

During the past decade, wife-swapping — that is, inter-couple sex — has grown to astonishing proportions in the United States. Thousands of married men and women now form a vast sexual underground, with its own rules, its own means of communication, its own self-justifications. Now, in the totally frank words of a young husband and wife who already are veterans, we learn in full detail about this spreading movement. How a couple is initiated. How they find others. How they are led from simple sex to the most far-out practices and perversions. What it does to their marital relations and their personal happiness. And. much more, all of it shocking, fascinating, illuminating. Here is the naked, vividly human truth about the new morality in America today.<

The top virologist in the country has been given a dark directive that may have horrific consequences, not only for him and his own daughter, but for the global population. The CIA have caught wind of a plot, but they need to send in one of their own. Nobody can be trusted. A young recruit has caught the CIA’s attention. She was born in Beijing, but spent most of her life in the States. Her life will be thrown into the deadly game of cat and mouse, pitting operative against a double agent to either save the world or to bring down the global economy. From Langley to Wuhan, Beijing to New York and finally in Milan, how will it end?<

*Written with the haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout and Barbara Kingsolver, an astonishing debut novel that explores the lingering effects of a brutal crime on the women of one small Texas oil town in the 1970s*. Mercy is hard in a place like this … It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field—an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, the stage is set for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences. *Valentine*  is a haunting exploration of the intersections of violence and race, class and region in a story that plumbs the depths of darkness and fear, yet offers a window into beauty and hope. Told through the alternating points of view of indelible characters who burrow deep in the reader’s heart, this fierce, unflinching, and surprisingly tender novel illuminates women’s strength and vulnerability, and reminds us that it is the stories we tell ourselves that keep us alive. ( *From the publisher*.)This is the story of… [life] in a backwater oil town in the mid-1970s, which Wetmore seems to know with empathy so deep it aches…. Several of these chapters are masterful short stories in their own right, but Wetmore knits them together with increasing intensity…. Wetmore has written something thrilling and thoughtful. Don’t let the launch of this novelist’s career be drowned out. Someday book clubs will meet again, and this would be a rousing choice. Ron Charles - Washington Post<

The Aldens are sight-seeing in New York City. But before the end of their very first day in the city someone steals the priceless Elizabeth Star Diamond from their friend Mr. Pound—and the Boxcar Children spring into mystery-solving action.<

The Indonesian Homo Floresiensis, a dwarf species of man, died out a scant twelve thousand years ago. But natives all across Indonesia tell stories of little people called Ebu Gogo, which bear a striking resemblance to Homo Floresiensis. Famed cryptozoologist Lewis Dare has traveled the world in search of mysterious, elusive cryptids. But nothing could have possibly prepared him for what horrors he would find on Floratra, an uninhabited island in Indonesia.<

Calder has survived the battle on the Gray Island, and escaped the Heart of Nakothi with his sanity intact. The Empire is without a leader, and he’s perfectly placed to take the reins himself. But he is not Emperor yet. The world is divided between those who support Imperial tradition and those who believe no one can take the throne. Calder must do everything he can to hold the Empire together, even as the Elders lurk in the shadows, ready to devour mankind. Meanwhile, Shera and her Consultant’s Guild are stronger than ever. If Calder doesn’t stop them soon, he may never get another chance. In the shadows, a woman seeks to divide mankind. On the seas, a man fights to save it.<

Decent men everywhere rejoiced in the Pendarvis Decision, which declared the species Fuzzy sapiens to be a sentient race entitled to all the rights and privileges of man. But of course that was only the beginning. Men had a long way to go before they would get over the habit of thinking of Fuzzies as adorable pets and begin to accept them as equals in the universe. The study of Fuzzies as a species had begun immediately, and some puzzling questions emerged: Where did Puzzles come from? What was their anthropology? Why did they seem such oddities, in many small but significant biological ways, on the planet where men found them? The answers that began to appear were startling- and potentially dangerous to the Fuzzies and to all who cared about them. H. BEAM PIPER ENDEARED HIMSELF TO MILLIONS OF READERS WITH LITTLE FUZZY AND FUZZY SAPIENS. NOW, AT LAST, THE STORY CONTINUES. WILLIAM TUNING HAS MADE AN EXHAUSTIVE STUDY OF PIPER'S CREATION, AND HAS HIMSELF CREATED A LABOR OF LOVE, A TRIBUTE TO ALL THAT PIPER STOOD FOR: FUZZY BONES<

Jack Pine was born to be a Hollywood star. He has no morals, no scruples; he will not hesitate to do anything or love anyone if it might advance his career, get him the best roles, or project him ever more firmly into the spotlight.

And success does come, beyond the imagination of Jack’s agents and co-stars — even beyond the hopes of his boyhood friend Buddy Pal, a man who carries with the dark secrets of Jack’s past.

Buddy stands apart, aloof: he alone truly benefits from Jack’s careening ambition and his artful, charming conniving. Others who depend on Jack may fall by the wayside, but how can the affable star be blamed?

In fact, Jack Pine can be excused anything — until he carries out the final sin, for which there can be no pardon.

Peter Naseby is enjoying a leisurely naval career when his ship runs down the Admiral in Command at Portsmouth. On his watch. It is early 1915 and he had been looking forward to joining the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. Now he must accept a posting to obscurity or volunteer for hazardous duty. To save his career, he joins the Blimps of the Royal Naval Air Service – he becomes a Balloonatic. Sat in a flimsy cockpit under 70,000 cubic feet of inflammable hydrogen with a crew of one, a Lewis Gun, and a single bomb, he potters out every day to chase submarines in the English Channel. Occasionally, he catches one. Onshore, he juggles the demands of Josephine, a young English rose, and Charlie, much more of a hothouse flower, while he decides just what his future shall be.<

When the crew of the deep space merchant vessel Riyadh emerge from cryogenic sleep, they expect to wake at Talus, the last jump before home. Instead, they find their ship docked at an uncharted Soviet space station under quarantine with no communications, failing life support and their Chief Officer missing. Stranded millions of light years from Earth, Captain Tor Gjerde has little option but to lead a salvage expedition to the seemingly abandoned station, but once aboard the decaying hulk Tor and his crew discover the terrible fate of Murmansk-13 and the horrifying legacy that remains lurking within its gloomy corridors.<

It’s late 1915 and the industrial nations still have not geared up for war. Shortages of munitions leave soldiers hanging on barbed wire in the fields. The war in France is at a stalemate, both sides finding it impossible to advance, and spending tens of thousands of lives on the discovery. Richard Baker is in the front line with his battalion, learning how to fight this new war. While the generals, well behind him, are only focussed on finding a way to let the cavalry loose in another Charge of the Light Brigade, reaching for glory. At sea, Simon Sturton continues to make a name for himself as one of the new breed of destroyermen, while Christopher Adams has overcome his fall from grace sufficiently to be posted to Black Prince cruiser, part of the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow in the months leading up to the long-awaited ‘Great Smash’ in the North Sea.<

A fascinating fictional account of the French Resistance in World War II. It's told by William Catesby and is a sort of prequel to the 6 part series of books about Catesby and his work as a British spy. Now in his 90's, he is dictating his memoirs of his time in Occupied France to his granddaughter Leanna. We learn that he left Cambridge University in 1941 to join the army but ended up as an officer with the SOE (Special Operations Executive) an organisation set up by the British Government 1940 with the aim of conducting espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe. There's a detailed account of Catesby's training before he is parachuted in to Occupied France to aid the Maquis with whom he shares the successes and failures in their battle against the German occupying forces and French collaborators. Although the author Edward Wilson stresses that this is a work of fiction, Catesby's memoirs provide an engrossing account of a British agent's experience fighting with the French Resistance. A wonderful blend of spy story, romance and the realities of war. Catesby's views are perfectly summed up when he tells Leanna: "That's why writing history is so difficult. Those in power drip feed the past - and edit what they pass on." Recommended for anyone with an interest in the real story of resistance in World War II, this is a worthy addition to the Catesby series.<