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To a penniless twenty-year-old like Jamie Long, surrogate motherhood seemed both an act of altruism and a financial opportunity. But once pregnant and under contract to Amanda Hartmann, the head of a famous evangelical family, Jamie realizes that she's getting more than she bargained for. Whisked away to the vast, isolated family ranch, she's closely supervised and carefully cut off from the outside world. She learns the family's dark secrets – and sees the enormity of their ruthlessness. When Jamie hears Amanda's plan to claim the baby as her natural-born child, she begins to suspect that her own life is in danger and resolves to flee.
Alone with a tiny newborn, she calls on the one man in the world she can trust – her high school crush, Joe Brammer. Their love unites them in a struggle to escape, and soon enough their flight becomes a fight for their lives.
Brilliantly weaving some of today's most controversial social issues into a captivating page-turner, The Surrogate is Judith Henry Wall's greatest triumph to date.
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When the women in his life – including his date, his neighbor, and his secretary – start turning up dead, attorney-turned-investigator Stone Barrington joins forces with his friend Dino, an NYPD lieutenant, to help clear his name.<
One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.
The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses. Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans...and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun and report back on what they find. Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.
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They Thought They Knew How The Universes Worked-THEY WERE WRONG. In the almost two centuries since the discovery of the first inter-universal portal, Arcana has explored scores of other worlds . . . all of them duplicates of their own. Multiple Earths, virgin planets with a twist, because the "explorers" already know where to find all of their vast, untapped natural resources. Worlds beyond worlds, effectively infinite living space and mineral wealth.And in all that time, they have never encountered another intelligent species. No cities, no vast empires, no civilizations and no equivalent of their own dragons, gryphons, spells, and wizards.But all of that is about to change. It seems there is intelligent life elsewhere in the multiverse. Other human intelligent life, with terrifying new weapons and powers of the mind . . . and wizards who go by the strange title of "scientist."<
IT ALL STARTED AS A MISTAKE!Both Arcana and Sharona had explored scores of universes, each a duplicate of its own, without ever encountering another human civilization.Then that changed.Two survey expeditions met in the cool shadows of an autumn forest. No one knows who shot first, but both sides have suffered heavy casualties, and each blames the other. Now both sides want possession of Hell's Gate, the cluster of inter-universal portals and their survey forces met in blood . . . and neither is prepared to let the other have it..Arcana's wizards, dragons, and gryphons are about to meet Sharona's bolt-action rifles, machine guns, and mortars. Transport dragons are about to meet steam locomotives. And all that either side really knows is that neither of them has ever seen a war like the one about to begin.<
Bahzell Bahnakson of the Horse Stealer hradani never wanted to be a champion of the War God. Unfortunately, Tomanāk had insisted. Even more unfortunately, Bahzell's own sense of responsibility hadn't let him say, "No."Which was how he found himself in the Empire of the Axe, where even people who didn't actively hate hradani regarded them with suspicion and fear. Of course, that was only the start of his problems. Next, there was the Order of Tomanāk, many of whom were horrified by the notion that their deity had chosen a hradani as a champion . . . and intended to do something about it. And assuming he survived that, he had to go home-across three hundred leagues of bitter winter snow-to face a Dark God who threatened to destroy all hradani. Throw in the odd demon and brigand ambush, and add a powerful neighboring kingdom with no intention of letting Bahzell (or anyone else) save his people, and you have the makings of a really bad day.But one thing Bahzell has learned: a champion of Tomanāk does what needs doing. And the people in his way had better move.<
VENGEANCE IS A DISH BEST SERVED HOT.Imperial Intelligence couldn't find them, the Imperial Fleet couldn't catch them, and local defenses couldn't stop them. It seemed the planet-wrecking pirates were invincible. But the pirates made a big mistake when they raided ex-commando leader Alicia DeVries' quiet home world, tortured and murdered her family, and then left her for dead.Since the Imperial forces seem hog-tied, Alicia decides to turn "pirate" herself, and steals a cutting-edge AI ship from the Empire to start her vendetta. Her fellow veterans think she's crazy, the Imperial Fleet has shoot-on-sight orders. And of course the pirates want her dead, too. But Alicia DeVries has two allies nobody knows about, allies as implacable as she is: a self-aware computer, and a creature from the mists of Old Earth's most ancient legends. And this trio of furies won't rest until vengeance is served.<
The Star Kingdom of Manticore is once again at war with the Republic of Haven after a stunning sneak attack. The graduating class from Saganami Island, the Royal Manticoran Navy's academy, are going straight from the classroom to the blazing reality of all-out war.Except for the midshipmen assigned to the heavy cruiser HMS Hexapuma, that is. They're being assigned to the Talbott Cluster, an out of the way backwater, far from the battle front. The most they can look forward to is the capture of the occasional pirate cruiser and the boring duty of supporting the Cluster's peaceful integration with the Star Kingdom at the freely expressed will of eighty percent of the Cluster's citizens. With a captain who may have seen too much of war and a station commander who isn't precisely noted for his brilliant and insightful command style, it isn't exactly what the students of Honor Harrington, the "Salamander," expected.But things aren't as simple -- or tranquil -- as they appear. The "pirates" they encounter aren't what they seem, and the "peaceful integration" they expected turns into something very different. A powerful alliance of corrupt Solarian League bureaucrats and ruthless interstellar corporations is determined to prevent the Cluster's annexation by the Star Kingdom . . . by any means necessary. Pirates, terrorists, genetic slavers, smuggled weapons, long-standing personal hatreds, and a vicious alliance of corporate greed, bureaucratic arrogance, and a corrupt local star nation with a powerful fleet, are all coming together, and only Hexapuma, her war-weary captain, and Honor Harrington's students stand in the path.They have only one thing to support and guide them: the tradition of Saganami. The tradition that sometimes a Queen's officer's duty is to face impossible odds . . . and die fighting.<
The Star Kingdom's ally Erewhon is growing increasingly restive in the alliance because the new High Ridge regime ignores its needs. Added to the longstanding problem of a slave labor planet controlled by hostile Mesans in Erewhon's stellar backyard, which High Ridge refuses to deal with, the recent assassination of the Solarian League's most prominent voice of public conscience indicates the growing danger of political instability in the Solarian League-which is also close to Erewhon.In desperation, Queen Elizabeth tries to defuse the situation by sending a private mission to Erewhon led by Captain Zilwicki, accompanied by one of her nieces. When they arrive on Erewhon, however, Manticore's envoys find themselves in a mess. Not only do they encounter one of the Republic of Haven's most capable agents-Victor Cachat-but they also discover that the Solarian League's military delegation seems up to its neck in skullduggery.And, just to put the icing on the cake, the radical freed slave organization, the Audubon Ballroom, is also on the scene-led by its notorious and ruthless assassin, Jeremy X.<
Unleash the Fury!Zhikotse. Shallingsport. Louvain. Sacred fields of battle on far-flung worlds where warriors of the Imperial Cadre spent blood and lives defending human civilization. Alicia DeVries was there; she led the charge. Her reward? Betrayal by a deceitful empire. Retirement to obscurity.Now Alicia is the only survivor of a brutal attack on her frontier-world family. Not since the mighty Achilles has the ancient spirit of the Fury Tisiphone taken up residence inside a human being. But not since Achilles has a warrior so skilled, so implacable, and possessing so much battle sense sprung up among the mass of humankind. Hero of the Empire. Holder of the Banner of Terra.<
In The War God’s Own, Bahzell had managed to stop a war by convincing Baron Tellian, leader of the Sothōii, to “surrender” to him, the War God’s champion. Now, he has journeyed to the Sothōii Wind Plain to oversee the parole he granted to Tellian and his men, to represent the Order of Tomanâk, the War God, and to be an ambassador for the hradani. What’s more, the flying coursers of the Sothōii have accepted Bahzell as a windrider-the first hradani windrider in history. And since the windriders are the elite of the elite among the Sothōii, Bahzell’s ascension is as likely to stir resentment as respect. That combination of duties would have been enough to keep anyone busy-even a warrior prince like Bahzell-but additional complications are bubbling under the surface. The goddess Shīgū, the Queen of Hell, is sowing dissension among the war maids of the Sothōii. The supporters of the deposed Sothōii noble who started the war are plotting to murder their new leige lord and frame Bahzell for the deed. Of course, those problems are all in a day’s work for a champion of the War God. But what is Bahzell going to do about the fact that Baron Tellian’s daughter, the heir to the realm, seems to be thinking that he is the only man-or hradani-for her?<
A brand new 50,000 word novella, Sword Brother.From the 20007 year edition of "Oath of Swords"<
Spacers call the warp point Charon's Ferry.No star ship has ever entered it and returned since a vengeful Orion task force pursued a doomed Terran colonization fleet into it in 2206.Almost a century has passed. The fiery hatreds of a quarter-century of warfare between the Terran Federation and the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaieeee, the cat-like species humans called the "Orions," have eased at least a little. The "Grand Alliance" forged by the need to fight side-by-side against the genocidal Rigelians remains, but there are those on either side who continue to hate, continue to distrust.Now the strength of that war-forged alliance is about to be tested. For Charon's Ferry is about to give up the secret of its dead. A ship has emerged from the deadly warp point at last. A ship which responds to the challenge of an Orion star ship using ancient human communications codes . . . then opens fire.The holocaust of interstellar warfare has been ignited anew, in a bloody crusade to free Holy Mother Terra.<
The more things change, the more they remain the same. Three thousand years after Sun Tszu wrote those words, in the time of the Fourth Interstellar War, the ancient advice still holds true. The "Bugs" have overwhelming numbers, implacable purpose, and a strategy that's mind-numbingly alien. They can't be reasoned or negotiated with. They can't even be communicated with. But what they want is terrifyingly clear. The sentient species in their path aren't enemies to be conquered; they're food sources to be consumed.Totally oblivious to their own losses, rumbling onward like some invincible force of nature, their enormous fleets are as unstoppable as Juggernaut. Yet for the desperate Federation Navy and its enemies-turned-allies, the Orions, there is nowhere to go. Their battered, outnumbered ships are all that stand between the billions upon billions of defenseless civilians on the worlds behind them and an enemy from the darkest depths of nightmare, and there can be no retreat. But at least their options are clear.As Sun Tzu said, in death ground, there is only one strategy:<
DEFEAT WAS NOT AN OPTION. The war wasn't going well. The mind-numbingly alien Arachnids were an enemy whose like no civilized race had ever confronted. Like some carnivorous cancer, the "Bugs" had overrun planet after planet . . . and they regarded any competing sentient species as only one more protein source. They couldn't be reasoned with, or even talked to, because no one had the least idea of how to communicate with a telepathic species with no recognizable language . . . and whose response to any communication attempt was a missile salvo. No one knew how large their civilization-if it could be called a "civilization"-actually was, or how it was organized, but the huge fleets they threw against their opponents suggested that it was enormous. The Grand Alliance of Humans, Orions, Ophiuchi, and Gorm, united in desperate self-defense, have been driven to the wall. Billions of their civilians have been slaughtered. Their most powerful offensive operation has ended in shattering defeat and the deaths of their most experienced and revered military commanders. The edge in technology with which they began the war is eroding out from under them and whatever they do, the Bugs just keep coming. But the warriors of the Grand Alliance know what stands behind them and they will surrender no more civilians to the oncoming juggernaut. They will die first . . . and they will also reactivate General Directive 18, however horrible it may be. Because when the only possible outcomes are victory or racial extermination, only one option is acceptable. The Shiva Option<
And peace isn’t always wonderful. Once the enemy was defeated, the central governments of the Inner Worlds were anything but willing to relinquish their wartime powers. To insure that their grip on the reins of power remained firm, the establishment plans to allow the non-human beings of the Khanate to join the Federation, thus reducing the Fringe Worlds voting bloc to impotent minority status. The ruthless bureaucrats of the Corporate Worlds are smugly confident that this power play will keep the colonial upstarts in their place. But the Fringers have only one answer to that: Insurrection<
Sarah Waters’ fourth novel, The Night Watch, is set in 1940s London, during and after the Second World War, and is an innovative departure from her previous three lesbian Victorian historical fictions. Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002) depend on melodramatic scenes of excess and chicanery, with occasional references to postmodern thinking. In comparison, The Night Watch is more constrained in its telling of love stories and secrets. Its tone echoes the view we have, in the 21st century, of rationed wartime Britain and the use of the more distant third-person, rather than the confiding first-person, signals a further diversion from the earlier works.
The structure of The Night Watch is worth remarking upon as it begins at the end in 1947. The second section takes us back to 1944, and the third and final section is set in 1941. The decision to use this type of structure is brave, even foolhardy, because of the problems in pulling it off convincingly, but Waters’ subtlety and restraint in pulling back the layers reveals the extent of her authorial control.
This novel is essentially concerned with five main characters (Kay, Viv, Helen, Julia and Viv’s brother, Duncan) and their separate private lives. The connections between these people are also elemental to the narrative. Coincidence plays a significant role in the unfolding of past events as their lives are shown to overlap. This use of coincidence has been a feature of Waters’ previous novels, but this time she uses it casually, and as an extra element, rather than for the purposes of manipulating the plot out of hand as was deemed necessary in a melodrama such as Fingersmith.
The love stories of Kay, Viv and Helen are central and, as the narrative traces back to 1941, we learn how their present views of relationships have been shaped by these past events. As with her previous novels, Waters continues to use lesbian relationships as a main focus of the narrative, but shifts away to examine the affair between Viv and Reggie, and the horrific illegal abortion she undergoes to spare her father from further shame.
Repression becomes a touchstone as many of the characters keep a secret or carry a weight of shame. The converse of this theme of fear of discovery is the examination of bravery. This is most notable in the second and third sections which are, necessarily, concerned with the bombing of London. A re-evaluation of the definition of courage is undertaken and is perhaps most poignant in the prison scene, where Duncan ’s cell mate, conscientious objector Fraser, asks himself if he is ‘simply a – a bloody coward’ when he is overwhelmed by the fear of death. The deconstruction of received morality, of what is to be brave or selfish in this time of heightened emotions, is also examined when Helen considers the effect the war has had on her ethics: ‘In the first blitz, she’d tried to help everyone; she’d given money to people, sometimes, from her own purse. But the war made you careless. You started off, she thought sadly, imagining you’d be a kind of heroine. You end up thinking only of yourself.’
The reason for Duncan ’s imprisonment is one of the well-kept secrets of the novel and is only (partially) explained in the third section. This use of the hidden truth and the hints at the unspoken strengthen the evocation of the period, where loose lips could potentially sink ships, and walls had ears. When revelations are made, they are, more often than not, as subdued as the repressed tone permits and this allows the novel to maintain the same pace throughout.
Despite this steady pace, Waters still enables the readers to see how the war also had a liberating effect on women such as Kay. Her gallantry and masculine demeanour was of use during the bombings whilst she worked as an ambulance driver, but in the beginning of the novel, in 1947, it is clear that with the return to peace time her short hair and male clothing are once more worthy of ridicule.
As with all of Waters’ novels, The Night Watch has been praised by critics for the attention to detail and meticulous research. This work stretches beyond the limits of the previous three, though, and is certainly her most impressive to date. Her control in depicting the central characters gradually is in itself an indicator of skilful writing. As this is also combined with a believable and interested evocation of period and place, this novel must be recommended highly.
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Flush es un `cocker spaniel` de orejas largas, cola ancha y unos `ojos atónitos color avellana`. A los pocos meses de su nacimiento es regalado a la ya famosa poestisa Elizabeth Barret. Fluxh se convertirá en su compañero inseparable y, posteriormente, en el cómplice de sus amoríos con el poeta Robert Browning, aunque primero debe superar la animadversión y los celos que siente ante su afortunado rival.<
Tal y como viene siendo habitual en la obra de Virginia Woolf, en?Al Faro? no se descubre nada nuevo para los incondicionales de la autora. Tanto en el argumento como en la técnica narrativa se pueden encontrar elementos comunes: personajes atormentados e insatisfechos consigo mismos y con la realidad que les ha tocado vivir, paisajes agrestes y desfavorables para la convivencia y habitabilidad humana, y la novedosa utilización de la tercera persona y del reproducción de los pensamientos de los protagonistas.
Este hecho puede dificultar la lectura a los no duchos en la materia, lo que no le quita un ápice a la tensión narrativa, al contrario, quizás se deba prestar más atención y leer con más tranquilidad. Apenas hay separación entre los participantes de un diálogo, sino que se reproducen literalmente lo que se les pasa por la cabeza, puede dar la sensación de que no hay contacto físico entre los individuos, lo que lleva al desconcierto y a darle a la incomunicación una importancia aún mayor.
La señora Ramsay planea hacer una excursión a un faro con sus ocho hijos y algunos amigos, pero el mal tiempo y la autoridad de un marido prepotente hará que sus planes se deshagan, lo que supone un enfrentamiento entre los miembros de la familia contra el señor Ramsay. La excursión podría interpretarse como una viaje?iniciático?, una válvula de escape ante la opresión, una huida en busca de la verdad por una mismo.
En cuanto a los personajes suelen repetirse los mismos roles que tanto obsesiona a la autora: la mujer,?realizada? como madre de familia numerosa, pero frustrada a nivel intelectual por la sociedad machista de la época victoriana, la estigmatización de la solterona,?obligada? a elegir entre la búsqueda de su felicidad, materializada en su cultivo profesional, pero casi siempre abandonada por?el qué dirán?, la figura del hombre, que aparece como una figura paternalista,?ejecutor? del carácter más rebelde y sublime de la mujer. Y, en cuanto los fenómenos atmosféricos, el mar, las tempestades, el viento… todos aliados en la eterna lucha de sexos, en la incompatibilidad, en la incomunicación…
Esposas rebeldes de pensamiento pero no de acción, mujeres que luchan por defender su valía, no sólo en el campo de la maternidad, individuos que oprimen, otros que son oprimidos…Todo tejido en todo a la complejidad del carácter de Virginia Wolf, que, o desconcierta y engancha, o harta.
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