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<|mystery|>The story takes place at Lincoln International , a fictional Chicago airport based very loosely on O Hare International Airport . The action mainly centers on Mel Bakersfeld , the Airport General Manager . His devotion to his job is tearing apart his family and his marriage to his wife Cindy , who resents his use of his job at the airport as a device to avoid going to various after hours events she wants him to participate in , as she attempts to climb into the social circles of Chicago s elite . His problems in his marriage are further exacerbated by his romantically charged friendship with a lovely divorcee , Trans America Airlines passenger relations manager Tanya Livingston . The story takes place mainly over the course of one evening and night , as a massive snowstorm plays havoc with airport operations . The storyline centers on Bakersfeld s struggles to keep the airport open during the storm . His chief problem is the unexpected closure of primary Runway 30 runway 29 in the subsequent film , caused when a landing airliner turns off past the wrong side of a runway marker light , burying the plane s landing gear in the snow , and blocking the runway . This becomes a major problem as another airplane , Trans America Flight Two , experiences a midair emergency and returns to Lincoln . This requires that runway 30 be made operational at any cost . The closing of runway 30 requires the use of shorter runway 25 runway 22 in the subsequent film , which has the unfortunate consequence of causing planes to take off over a noise sensitive suburb , whose residents picket the airport in protest . The shorter runway 25 is also later inadequate to land the returning airplane , which has suffered major structural and mechanical damage due to explosive decompression caused by the detonation of the bomb brought on board . The book presents an overview of the vast and complex operations involved in operating a major commercial airport , much of which is still applicable over 40 years later . Several major and minor characters appear , illustrating the vast complexity of the airport and its operations . They include Customs officers , lawyers , snow clearers , airport police , doctors , clerks etc .

<|mystery|>The narrator presents the facts of the extraordinary case of Valdemar which have incited public discussion . He is interested in Mesmerism , a pseudoscience involving bringing a patient into a hypnagogic state by the influence of magnetism , a process which later developed into hypnotism . He points out that , as far as he knows , no one has ever been mesmerized at the point of death , and he is curious to see what effects mesmerism would have on a dying person . He considers experimenting on his friend Ernest Valdemar , an author whom he had previously mesmerized , and who has recently been diagnosed with phthisis tuberculosis . Valdemar consents to the experiment and informs the narrator by letter that he will probably die in twenty four hours . Valdemar s two physicians inform the narrator of their patient s poor condition . After confirming again that Valdemar is willing to be part of the experiment , the narrator comes back the next night with two nurses and a medical student as witnesses . Again , Valdemar insists he is willing to take part and asks the narrator to hurry , for fear he has deferred it for too long . Valdemar is quickly mesmerized , just as the two physicians return and serve as additional witnesses . In a trance , he reports first that he is dying then that he is dead . The narrator leaves him in a mesmeric state for seven months , checking on him daily . During this time Valdemar is without pulse , heartbeat or perceptible breathing , his skin cold and pale . Finally , the narrator makes attempts to awaken Valdemar , asking questions which are answered with difficulty , his voice seemingly coming from his swollen , blackened tongue . In between trance and wakefulness , Valdemar s tongue begs to quickly either put him back to sleep or to wake him . As Valdemar s voice shouts dead ! dead ! repeatedly , the narrator takes Valdemar out of his trance in the process , Valdemar s entire body immediately decays into a nearly liquid mass of loathsome of detestable putrescence .

<|fantasy|>A powerful and righteous 8th century king named Alobar narrowly escapes regicide at the hands of his own subjects , as it is their custom to kill the king at the first sign of aging . After fleeing , no longer a king but a simple peasant , he travels through Eurasia , and eventually meets the goat god Pan , who is slowly losing his powers as the world turns toward Christianity . In India , he meets a girl , Kudra , who goes on to become his wife . As with most of Robbins couples , their mutual libido is enormous , and their love quite like something out of a fairy tale . After an encounter with a mysterious group known as The Bandaloop Doctors , Alobar is set down the path towards eternal life , which , according to Robbins , can be attained by a consistent ritual of controlled breath work , simple eating , sex , and bathing in extremely hot water . Alobar and Kudra , successful in their immortality , travel about Europe until the 17th century , when they attempt a sort of new transcendental meditation and become separated into different astral planes . Meanwhile , in present day , a genius waitress named Priscilla struggles with a difficult job in a low end Mexican restaurant . Priscilla is an amateur perfumer , and is obsessed with trying to locate the base note in recreating a fragrance , something she believes will be almost magical , from a three hundred year old perfume bottle in her possession . While dealing with this , she juggles the unwanted advances of a lesbian co worker , has a brief affair with an eccentric millionaire obsessed with eternal life , and contemplates the mysterious deliveries of beets to her apartment . In New Orleans , Priscilla s stepmother , the Madame Devalier , a once successful perfumer , is also working to recreate the same fragrance as Priscilla , after her assistant , V lu re liberated the ancient bottle . Madame Devalier is intent on restoring her name in the business , and discontinuing the production items one might construe as shady . She seeks something magical using the ultra ingredient Jamaican jasmine supplied by a mysterious man with the helmet of swarming bees , Bingo Pajama . In Paris , the LeFever Parfumaire is concerned about their eccentric leader , Marcel , who equates smell as the most important factor in the forward movement of the evolutionary process . After witnessing an eclipse , he is obsessed with his own scent . The story lines eventually converge into a climax in New Orleans , with a brief stop in another dimension . The main message is summarized in the dying words of Albert Einstein , spoken in Alobar s 8th century Bohemian dialect Erleichda , loosely translated as lighten up .

<|action|>Paul Benjamin is a CPA in New York and lifelong liberal . However , his staid life is overturned when his daughter , Carol , and spouse , Esther , are attacked by muggers . His wife does not survive the attack , and his traumatized daughter is left in a vegetative state . Forced to reevaluate his views , Benjamin becomes paranoid and eager for vengeance . After a trip to Arizona , a friend gives him a revolver as a gift . Benjamin shoots a mugger who accosts him . Benjamin continues to take justice into his own hands , drawing would be muggers into traps by using himself as the bait . In one case , he rents a car , pulls it over to the side of the road , and writes an Out of Gas sign on the vehicle . He then hides , waiting for someone to steal the car . When some lawbreakers do so , he shoots them . It is only within the last fifty pages of the first novel that Benjamin slays his first victim . The second novel , Death Sentence , states that Benjamin murdered seventeen people over five weeks .

<|fantasy|>The novel begins with the phrase , In the beginning was the myth . God , in his search for self expression , invested the souls of Hindus , Greeks , and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child s soul with poetry every day . The novel is purely poetical , and its protagonist in time aspires to become a poet who invests the lives of men with reality in its most beautiful of forms . Peter Camenzind easily reminds one of Hesse s other protagonists , i . e . Siddhartha , Goldmund , and Harry Haller . Like them , he suffers deeply and undergoes many intellectual , physical , and spiritual journeys . In the course of his many journeys , he will come to experience the diverse landscapes of Germany , Italy , France , and Switzerland , as well as the wide range of emotions that humans exhibit at different stages in their lives . In a later stage of his life , he will embody the ideal of St . Francis as he cares for a cripple . Peter Camenzind , as a youth , leaves his mountain village with a great ambition to experience the world and to become one of its denizens . Having experienced the loss of his mother at an early age , and with a desire to leave behind a callous father , he heads to university . As he progresses through his studies , he meets and falls in love with the painter , Erminia Aglietti and becomes a close friend to a young pianist named Richard . Greatly saddened because of the latter s death , he takes up wandering to soak up the diverse experiences of life . Ever faced with the vicissitudes of life , he continually takes up alcohol as a means to confront the harshness and inexplicable strangeness of life . He also meets and falls in love with Elizabeth , even though she will later marry another man . However , his journey through Italy changes him in many respects and enhances his ability to love life and see beauty within all things . It is only when he becomes friends with Boppi , an invalid , does he truly experience what it means to love other human beings . In time , he comes to see a wonderful reflection of humanity in its most noble of forms in Boppi , and the two forge an indelible friendship . After Boppi dies , Peter Camenzind returns to his village and takes care of his aging father , even as he plans out the completion of his life s great work .

<|childrens|>During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands Anne Frank began to keep a diary on June 14 , 1942 , two days after her 13th birthday , and twenty two days before going into hiding with her mother Edith Frank , father Otto Frank , sister Margot Frank and three other people , Hermann van Pels , Auguste van Pels , and Peter van Pels . The group went into hiding in the sealed off upper rooms of the annex of her father s office building in Amsterdam . The sealed off upper rooms also contained a hidden door behind which the Franks would hide during the parts when Nazi soldiers were investigating the buildings for harbored Jews . Mrs . van Pels dentist , Fritz Pfeffer , joined them four months later . In the published version , names were changed the van Pels are known as the Van Daans and Fritz Pfeffer is known as Mr . Dussel . With the assistance of a group of Otto Frank s trusted colleagues , they remained hidden for two years and one month , until their betrayal in August 1944 , which resulted in their deportation to Nazi concentration camps . Of the group of eight , only Otto Frank survived the war . Anne died in Bergen Belsen from a typhus infection in early March , shortly about two weeks before liberation by British troops in April 1945 .

<|fantasy|>Kira is a girl with a twisted leg who lives in a more primitive society where people who can t work die . She has been kept alive by her mother , and , when her mother dies , is brought before the Council of Guardians . Kira s life is spared when she proves she can embroider well , and is assigned to the task of fixing up the robe worn by the singer whose only job is to sing the story of human civilization once a year . She meets Thomas , the boy whose duty is to carve the Singer s staff and , when running out of thread , begins making a trip to the hut of Annabella , an old woman who teaches Kira dyeing . Annabella shows her the plants needed to make every color , except for blue . Kira slowly learns that her life is less than idyllic . She hears crying in her building , and she and Thomas discover another orphan girl whose ability is to sing and will eventually replace the current Singer . The orphan girl is scolded and punished if she doesn t sing Kira befriends her but realize that she , Thomas , and the orphan girl do not have as much freedom as thought . At the Ceremony , she sees the Singer whose robe she is fixing . She realizes that his feet are chained , and he is essentially a prisoner . The implication is that she and the others with Gifts are also prisoners . Kira is also friends with a boy named Matt . Matt tells Kira of a village he once came across while lost in the woods . This village has blue . When the day that the Singer sings his song comes , Matt is nowhere to be found . He eventually returns with a blind man from the village in a blue shirt . The man , it turns out , is the father whom Kira thought was dead . He now lives in a community made up of injured and disabled people who help one another . He has enemies on the council and is forced to return , while Kira decides to stay in the village to continue to mend the singer s robe and help improve the society she lives in .

<|fantasy|>Through the narrator s first person account we hear the story of the people and the events of iDEATH . The central tension is created by Margaret , once a lover of the narrator , and inBOIL , a rebellious man who has left iDEATH to live near a forbidden area called the Forgotten Works . It is a huge trash heap where the remnants of a former civilization lie abandoned in great piles . Margaret , a collector of such forgotten things , is friendly with inBOIL and his followers , who explore the place and make whiskey . inBOIL s separation from the group may have been related to the annihilation of The Tigers , killed many years previously by the people . It is unknown to the reader whether The Tigers were actual tigers , human beings or somehow anthropomorphic while the tigers would kill and eat people including the narrator s parents they could also talk , sing , play musical instruments and were at least competent with arithmetic . Two tigers were killed on a bridge known later as the abandoned bridge . The last tiger was killed on a spot later developed into a trout farm . In the violent climax of the novel , inBOIL returns to the community along with a handful of followers , planning , he says , to show the residents what iDEATH really is . The residents know only that something is about to happen for all they know , inBOIL could be plotting to kill them all . Margaret appears oblivious to the threats , and unconcerned about the safety of her own family and friends . Many suspect that Margaret knew and did not reveal details of inBOIL s real plan , thus conspiring with the evil men . She is semi ostracized from iDEATH , and at the beginning of the novel the narrator reveals he had ended their relationship because of these events .

<|fantasy|>In the wake of the events of The Mathematics of Magic , Harold Shea and his lady love Belphebe of Faerie have married and settled happily into a mundane earthly existence . But after Belphebe disappears at a picnic , Shea is questioned by the police on suspicion of foul play . The authorities also question his work colleagues at the Garaden Institute , Walter Bayard and Vaclav Polacek , and then decide to take in the three of them for further interrogation . At that point the whole group , including police officer Pete Brodsky , are spirited away to another world , that of the Xanadu which is the subject of Samuel Taylor Coleridge s poem Kubla Khan . After they have all languished there for a time , Shea and Polacek are pulled away from this world as well and into that represented by Ludovico Ariosto s epic , the Orlando Furioso . The person responsible for their plight turns out to be Reed Chalmers , aspiring magician and former head of the Garaden Institute , who had accompanied Shea to Faerie in his previous adventure . He had been attempting to retrieve Shea alone , but had erroneously pulled in Belphebe first , and then misplaced his three colleagues and the police officer before at last getting things nearly right . Aside , that is , from getting Polacek too and leaving Bayard and Brodsky stranded in Xanadu . Moreover , as Ariosto s epic was a source text for Edmund Spenser s The Faerie Queen , Belphebe s mind has become confused , reverting in accord with the setting to that of her Furioso prototype , Belphagor . As a result , she now believes herself a native of the world into which they have been plunged , no longer recognizing Shea as her husband ! Chalmer s goal was to seek Shea s assistance in transforming his own love , the lady Florimel , a human simulacrum magically made of snow , into a real person . It was also to that end that he himself had come to this world , where he is now the guest of the wizard Atlantès de Carena in the latter s marvelous iron castle in northern Spain . The world of the Furioso is based on Carolingian legend , and the Moorish Spain in which the extradimensional travelers find themselves is in the midst of a conflict with the Frankish empire of Charlemagne and his paladins . Somehow they must manage to negotiate their way through the delicate international politics , tiptoe around the treacherous Atlantès , achieve Chalmers ambitions for Florimel , restore Belphebe s sanity and survive ! Beyond that there are still Bayard and Brodsky to rescue , though those are tasks for later tales . . .

<|childrens|>Anne is about to start her first term teaching at the Avonlea school , although she will still continue her studies at home with Gilbert , who is teaching at the nearby White Sands School . The book soon introduces Anne s new and problematic neighbor , Mr . Harrison , and his foul mouthed parrot , as well as the twins , Davy and Dora . They are the children of Marilla s third cousin and she takes them in when their mother dies while their uncle is out of the country . Dora is a nice , well behaved girl , somewhat boring in her perfect behaviour . Ironically Davy is an exact opposite , much more of a handful and constantly getting into many scrapes . They are initially meant to stay only a short time , but the twins uncle postpones his return to collect the twins and then eventually dies . Both Anne and Marilla are relieved Marilla inwardly of course to know the twins will remain with her . Other characters introduced are some of Anne s new pupils , such as Paul Irving , an American boy living with his grandmother in Avonlea while his widower father works in the States . He delights Anne with his imagination and whimsical ways , which are reminiscent of Anne s in her childhood . Later in the book , Anne and her friends meet Miss Lavendar Lewis , a sweet but lonely lady in her 40s who had been engaged to Paul s father 25 years before , but parted from him after a disagreement . At the end of the book , Mr . Irving returns and he and Miss Lavendar marry . Anne discovers the delights and troubles of being a teacher , takes part in the raising of Davy and Dora , and organizes the A . V . I . S . Avonlea Village Improvement Society together with Gilbert , Diana , and Fred Wright , though their efforts to improve the town are not always successful . The Society takes up a subscription to repaint an old town hall , only to have the painter provide the wrong color of paint , turning the hall into a bright blue eyesore . Towards the end of the book , Mrs . Rachel Lynde s husband dies and Mrs . Lynde moves in with Marilla at Green Gables , allowing Anne to go to college at last . She and Gilbert make plans to attend Redmond College in the fall . This book sees Anne maturing slightly , even though she still cannot avoid getting into a number of her familiar scrapes , as only Anne can some of which include selling her neighbor s cow having mistaken it for her own , or getting stuck in a broken duck house roof while peeping into a pantry window .

<|childrens|>Anne leaves Green Gables and her work as a teacher in Avonlea to pursue her original dream which she gave up in Anne of Green Gables of taking further education at Redmond College in Nova Scotia . Gilbert Blythe and Charlie Sloane enroll as well , as do Anne s friends from Queen s Academy , Priscilla Grant and Stella Maynard . During her first week of school , Anne befriends Philippa Gordon , a beautiful girl whose frivolous ways charm her . Philippa Phil for short also happens to be from Anne s birthplace of Bolingbroke , Nova Scotia . The girls spend their first year in boardinghouses and decide to set up house thereafter in a lovely cottage called Patty s Place , near campus . The girls enter their second year at Redmond happily ensconced at Patty s Place , while life continues in Avonlea . Diana Barry becomes engaged to Fred Wright and Davy and Dora continue to keep Marilla busy . Midway through their college years , Gilbert , who has always loved Anne , proposes to her but Anne rejects him although she and Gilbert are very close , she holds sentimental fantasies about true love all featuring a tall , dark , handsome , inscrutable hero and does not recognize her true feelings for Gilbert . Gilbert leaves , his heart broken , and the two drift apart . Anne s childhood friend Ruby Gillis dies of consumption very soon after finding her own true love . Anne later welcomes the courtship of Roy Gardner , a darkly handsome Redmond student who showers her with attention and poetic gestures . However , when he proposes after two years , Anne abruptly realizes that Roy does not really belong in her life , and that she had only been in love with the idea of him as the embodiment of her romantic image of love . Anne is so ashamed in how she treated Roy that she feels her entire Redmond experience may have been spoiled . She returns to Green Gables , a full fledged B . A . , but finds herself a bit lonely . Diana gives birth to her first child , and Jane Andrews , an old school friend , marries a Winnipeg millionaire . Having received an offer to be the principal of the Summerside school in the fall , Anne is keeping herself occupied over the summer when she learns that Gilbert is gravely ill with typhoid fever . With shock , Anne finally realizes how deep her true feelings for Gilbert are , and endures a white night of fear that he will leave this world without knowing that she does care . In the morning , Anne gratefully learns that Gilbert will survive . Gilbert recovers over the summer , bolstered by a letter from Phil assuring him that there is really nothing between Anne and Roy . After several visits to Green Gables , Gilbert and Anne take a late summer walk in Hester Gray s garden , and finally become engaged .

<|novel|>Anne of Windy Poplars takes place over the three years between Anne s graduation from Redmond College and her marriage to Gilbert Blythe . While Gilbert is in medical school , Anne takes a job as the principal of Summerside High School , where she also teaches . She lives in a large house called Windy Poplars with two elderly widows , Aunt Kate and Aunt Chatty , plus their housekeeper , Rebecca Dew , and their cat , Dusty Miller . During her time in Summerside , Anne must learn to manage many of Summerside s inhabitants , including the clannish and resentful Pringle family , her bitter colleague Katherine Brooke , and others of Summerside s more eccentric residents . Additionally , Anne befriends the young and lonely Elizabeth Grayson , a motherless member of the Pringle family who lives next door to Windy Poplars . She frequently visits Marilla at Green Gables . At the end of the novel , Anne departs Summerside , returning to Green Gables and Avonlea for her wedding to Gilbert . Upon her departure many of the town s residents express that they will greatly miss her as they have grown very fond of her or have been helped by her , including Katherine Brooke and Elizabeth Grayson .

<|novel|>Seven years after Anne s House of Dreams , Anne visits Diana Wright and her daughter , Anne Cordelia , in Avonlea following the funeral of Gilbert s father . When she returns home to the old Morgan house , now named Ingleside , she is greeted by her five children James Matthew Jem , the eldest , now aged seven Walter Cuthbert , who is about six and often thought to be a bit of a sissy because of his love for poetry twins Anne Nan and Diana Di , who are five and look nothing alike , Nan with brown hair and hazel eyes , and Di with red hair and green eyes and finally Shirley , two years old and Susan Baker s favorite , as she took care of him as an infant while Anne was very sick following his birth . The book includes the dreadful , seemingly eternal visit of Gilbert s disagreeable , oversensitive aunt Mary Maria Blythe , whose visit was only supposed to last two weeks but stretches on for months and who only leaves when Anne unintentionally offends her by arranging a surprise birthday party , much to the relief of the family . During the novel , Anne and Gilbert s youngest child is born and is named Bertha Marilla Blythe . She is also called Roly Poly , or , generally , Rilla . The novel includes a series of adventures which spotlight one of Anne s children at a time as they engage in the misunderstandings and mishaps of youth . At the end of the book , Anne worries that Gilbert has grown distant and possibly doesn t love her anymore . She and Gilbert spend a disagreeable evening with the widowed and childless Christine Stuart , who was once Anne s rival or so she thought for Gilbert s love . Suddenly realizing how tired Gilbert looks , Anne begins to wonder if she has been taking Gilbert for granted . At the end she is proven wrong , as Gilbert s lack of attention was caused by worry over one of his patients . He surprises Anne with an anniversary gift and a promise of a trip to Europe for a medical congress .

<|fantasy|>The dreary succession of randomly selected Kings of England is broken up when Auberon Quin , who cares for nothing but a good joke , is chosen . To amuse himself , he institutes elaborate costumes for the provosts of the districts of London . All are bored by the King s antics except for one earnest young man who takes the cry for regional pride seriously nbsp Adam Wayne , the eponymous Napoleon of Notting Hill . While the novel is humorous one instance has the King sitting on top of an omnibus and speaking to it as to a horse Forward , my beauty , my Arab , he said , patting the omnibus encouragingly , fleetest of all thy bounding tribe , it is also an adventure story . Chesterton is not afraid to let blood be drawn in his battles , fought with sword and halberd in the London streets between neighboring boroughs Wayne thinks up some ingenious strategies , and Chesterton does not shrink from the death in combat of some of his characters . Finally , the novel is philosophical , contemplating the value and meaning of man s actions and the virtue of respect for one s enemies . Michael Collins , who led the fight for Irish independence from British Rule , is known to have admired the book . There has been speculation that the setting of the book prompted the date chosen for the setting of George Orwell s Nineteen Eighty Four . The novel is also quoted at the start of Neil Gaiman s novel Neverwhere .

<|childrens|>The Butter Battle Book tells the story of a land where two hostile cultures , the Yooks and the Zooks , live on opposite sides of a long curving wall , fairly similar to the Berlin Wall . The Yooks wear blue clothes the Zooks wear orange . The main dispute between the two cultures is that the Yooks eat their bread with the butter side up , while the Zooks eat their bread with the butter side down . The conflict between the two sides leads to an escalating arms race , each competing to make bigger and better weapons to outdo the other , which results in the threat of mutual assured destruction . The race begins when a Zook named Van Itch slingshots the Yooks Tough Tufted Prickly Snick Berry Switch , which could be used to give Zooks a twitch if they dared to come close to the wall , which was guarded by the Zook Watching Border Patrol . The Yooks then develop a machine with three slingshots interlinked , called a Triple Sling Jigger . This works once Van Itch got scared and ran off , but the Zooks counterattack with their own creation The Jigger Rock Snatchem , a machine with three nets to fling the rocks fired from the Triple Sling Jigger back at the Yooks side just as fast as we catch em . The Yooks then discover that slingshots are old fashioned , and create a gun called the Kick A Poo Kid , loaded with powerful Poo A Doo powder and ants eggs and bees legs and dried fried clam chowder , and toted by a dog named Daniel , the country s first gun toting spaniel . The Zooks counterattack with an Eight Nozzled Elephant Toted Boom Blitz , a machine that shoots high explosive sour cherry stone pits , and will put your dumb Kick A Poo Kid on the fritz ! The Yooks then devise a machine called the Utterly Sputter , a large blue mecha with two very tall mechanical legs , a cabin which resembles that of a helicopter s , but with no rotors , and four faucets on the back , whose main purpose was to sprinkle blue goo all over the Zooks ! . But the Zooks counterattack with a Sputter identical to the Yooks . Eventually , each side possesses a small but extremely destructive red bomb called the Bitsy Big Boy Boomeroo , the smallest weapon of all , and neither has any defense against it . The TV special see below demonstrates the development of the weapon in a mysterious , and somewhat frightening , mad scientist style song complete with living goo , floating rings , ghosts , snakes , and chemical flasks which imitate volcanoes . No resolution is reached by the book s end , with the generals of both sides on the wall poised to drop their bombs and waiting to see who will do it first . The question is left hanging for the reader to answer by his or her actions , much like the question UNLESS at the end of Dr . Seuss book , The Lorax . The book thus departs from the commonly accepted approach to children s writing , of positive themes and resolution of the plot s conflict by the end of the story .

<|fantasy|>By the year 3172 , political power in the galaxy is split between two factions the older Earth based Draco and the historically younger Pleiades Federation . Both have interests in the even newer Outer Colonies , where mines produce trace amounts of the prized power source Illyrion , the superheavy material essential to starship travel and terraforming planets . Caught in a feud between aristocratic and economically powerful families , a scarred and obsessed captain from the Pleiades , Lorq Von Ray , recruits a disparate crew of misfits to aid him in the race with his arch enemy , Prince Red from Draco s Red Shift Ltd . , to gain economic leadership by securing a vastly greater amount of Illyrion directly from the heart of a stellar nova . In doing so , Von Ray will shift the balance of power of the existing galactic order , which will bring about the downfall of the Red family as well as end Earth s dominance over interstellar politics . As the title indicates , the central metaphor for the novel is a nova the destructive implosion explosion of an entire sun , which , paradoxically , while it destroys most of a solar system , also creates new elements . In the book , at the eruption of a nova , not only do the laws of physics break down , but so do the laws of politics and psychology . This idea permeates the entire plot and storyline . The characters follow a quest plot line , in which they visit several worlds to gain information necessary to achieve their goal , all the while pursued by the Red family . Although the novel does not indulge the literary experimentation found in Delany s later books , it maintains a high level of innovation . Some chapters end or begin in mid sentence . Also , the point of view regularly shifts between Lorq , Katin , and the Mouse . Each page in the book carries a header that gives the year and location of the scene on the page itself e . g . , Draco , Earth , Paris , 3162 . This is useful because of the flashbacks in the long journey around the galaxy .

<|action|>The story is about judge Rachel Cutler and her husband Paul , a divorced American couple caught up in a treasure hunt for the long missing Amber Room . A couple of competitive professional treasure hunters complicate matters . In their search through Germany to uncover the secrets behind its disappearance , they escape near death in the tunnels running through the Harz Mountains , find themselves hanging off the edge of a tall church steeple , and discover a surprise in a hidden chamber of a Bohemian castle in the Czech Republic .

<|fantasy|>Phelim awakes one morning while his sister , Prudence , is away . He soon learns that he is the inheritor of a responsibility to stop the apocalyptic Stoor Worm from waking . In order to do this , he must overcoming a strong reluctance rally the three symbolic figures of Maiden , Fool , and Horse , elude the Stoor Worm s monstrous children , and reach the Worm at her resting place . At this he succeeds , encountering various dangers and losing his companions en route . At the climax , Phelim kills the Stoor Worm outright and returns home , thereafter making his sister ride on a horse and making it go to the farthest sea . This hypocrisy contrasted with his name , which is translated as Ever Good , strips him of his own symbolic significance . At the end , he seeks counsel of his father .

<|romance|>The son of the Duke and Duchess of Avon , the Marquis of Vidal is known as Devil s Cub not only for the excesses of his father but for his own wild habits . As he is paying court to a girl of the bourgeoisie , Sophia Challoner , he also participates in a rather impromptu duel , the outcome of which forces him to leave the country . He intends to bring Sophia with him as his mistress but her strait laced sister Mary has no intention of allowing her sister to be ruined , and takes her place , assuming that the Marquis will let her go once the mistake is discovered , leaving him with no chance to take Sophia afterwards . But she has not yet obtained the measure of the Marquis s personality , for in the grip of fury he takes Mary off with him instead , and only when they are in France and it is too late for either to turn back does he realise that by abducting a respectable girl he has compromised her and is obliged to offer her marriage . However , Mary refuses Vidal because she believes he is making the offer from guilt and as she has fallen in love with him she finds this intolerable . In her misery , she runs away , intending to seek her own fortune . While away , she meets Vidal s father , the Duke of Avon , by chance , and takes him into her confidence without realising that she is talking to Avon who is an old crony of her grandfather s and has come to France to investigate the rumours surrounding his son and scotch any scandal . The two reach an excellent understanding , with Avon clearly coming to respect Mary . Vidal pursues , and ultimately realizes he loves her , persuading her to marry him in spite of Avon s dry observation that she could do better . Heyer s An Infamous Army is a sequel to Devil s Cub . class wikitable ! These Old Shades ! Devil s Cub Justin Alastair , Duke of Avon Justin Alastair , Duke of Avon Léonie de Saint Vire Léonie de Saint Vire Alastair , Duchess of Avon Lady Fanny Alastair Marling Lady Fanny Alastair Marling Edward Marling Mr . John Marling son of Edward Marling , now deceased Lord Rupert Alastair Lord Rupert Alastair Harriet Alastair Field Harriet Alastair Field Mr . Hugh Davenant Mr . Hugh Davenant

<|childrens|>When Sofia s hometown is destroyed by The Bandits , Muazena , the village s wise woman , must find a way to teach Sofia the secrets in the fire . Even with Muazena trying to help , Sofia must overcome multiple adversities such as losing both her sister and her legs to a land mine and all of the strife that comes with growing up . Throughout her recovery Sofia finds that she is not as weak as some would have her believe and that she has a strength of her own .

<|fantasy|>In contrast to Ballard s earlier novel The Drowned World , The Burning World describes a world in which water is scarce . After an extensive drought , rivers have turned to trickles and the earth to dust , causing the world s populations to head toward the oceans in search of water . The drought is caused by industrial waste flushed into the ocean , which form an oxygen permeable barrier of saturated long chain polymers that prevents evaporation and destroys the precipitation cycle . Since the novel was published , plastic islands such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have been discovered , which permeate large areas of the world s oceans the impact on ocean evaporation and the precipitation cycle has not been studied .

<|fantasy|>The main character is Tycho Tithonus , an 11 year old boy . Each child in his family is named after a famous artist or scientist and their parents expect them to live up to their names . Tycho himself is named after Sleator s younger brother , who in turn , was named after Tycho Brahe , the Danish astronomer . He finds a pocket sized time machine in the family s garden . He immediately uses it to change some things from the past and to visit the future . But as he travels more and more he realizes that he is turning into something horrible and it becomes a race against time to save all of his family and himself .

<|childrens|>The story also deals with an issue that has affected Sue Townsend directly she was registered blind in 2001 , as a result of long term diabetes . Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction was typed by Townsend s husband from dictation . The novel is a bestseller due to the series dedicated fan base , and has met with critical acclaim . Critics have praised the novel for its combination of sitcom style humour with an underlying element of tragedy and pathos . Some consider it less comical and darker than the previous installment , Adrian Mole The Cappuccino Years . Critics claim that Mole s immature and angst ridden personality has lost its appeal as he approaches middle age , where it was endearing in a younger man .

<|childrens|>The story begins as Mr . and Mrs . Mallard fly over various potential locations to start a family . Each time Mr . Mallard selects a location , Mrs . Mallard finds something wrong with it . Tired from their search , the mallards land at the Public Garden Lagoon to spend the night . In the morning , a swan boat passes by the mallards . The mallards mistake the swan boat for a real bird and have a second breakfast of peanuts thrown from the people on the boat . Mrs . Mallard suggests that they build their nest in the Public Garden . However , just as she says this , she is nearly run down by a passing bicyclist . The mallards continue their search , flying over Boston landmarks such as Beacon Hill , the Massachusetts State House , and Louisburg Square . The mallards finally decide on an island in the Charles River . From this island , the mallards visit a policeman named Michael on the shore , who feeds them peanuts every day . Shortly thereafter , the mallards molt , and would not be able to fly again , until their new wings grew again , and Mrs . Mallard hatches eight ducklings named Jack , Kack , Lack , Mack , Nack , Ouack , Pack , and Quack . After the ducklings are born , Mr . Mallard decides to take a trip up the river to see what the rest of it is like . Mr . and Mrs . Mallard agree to meet at the Public Garden in one week . In the meantime , Mrs . Mallard teaches the eight ducklings all they need to know about being ducks , such as swimming , diving , marching along , and to avoid dangers such as bicycles and other wheeled objects . One week later , Mrs . Mallard leads the ducklings ashore and straight to the highway in hopes of crossing to reach the Garden , but she has trouble crossing as the cars will not yield to her . Michael , the policeman who fed peanuts to the Mallards , stops traffic for the family to cross . Michael calls police headquarters and instructs them to send a police car to stop traffic along the route for the ducks . The ducks cross the highway , Embankment Road the eastern extension of Storrow Drive , then proceed down Mount Vernon Street to Charles Street where they head south to the Garden . The people on the streets admire the family of ducks and compliment them for being a family that is sticking together . When the family must cross Beacon Street to enter the Garden , there are four policeman standing in the intersection stopping traffic to make way for the ducklings . Mr . Mallard is waiting in the Public Garden for the rest of the family . Finally , the family decides to stay in the Garden and lives happily ever after . They end each day searching for peanuts and food , and when night falls , they swim to their little island and go to sleep .

<|novel|>A woman arrives in Guernsey , with her son Gilliat , and buys a house said to be haunted . The boy grows up , the woman dies . Gilliat becomes a good fisherman and sailor . People believe him to be a wizard . In Guernsey also lives a former sailor , Mess Lethierry , the owner of the first steam ship of the island Durande and his niece Deruchette . One day , near Christmas , when going to church , she sees Gilliat on the road behind her and writes his name in the snow . He sees this and becomes obsessed with her gesture . In time he falls in love with her and goes to play the bagpipes near her house . Sieur Clubin , the trusted captain of Durande , sets up a plan to sink the ship in the Hanois cilffs and flee with a ship of Spanish smugglers , Tamaulipas . He gets in touch with Rantaine , a swindler who had stolen a large sum of money from Mess Lethierry many years ago . Clubin takes the money from Rantaine at gunpoint . In thick fog , Clubin sails for the Hanois cliffs from where he can easily swim to the shore , meet the smugglers and disappear , leaving the appearance of having drowned . Instead , he loses his way and sails to the Douvres cliffs which are much further from the shore . Left alone on the ship , he is terrified but he sees a cutter and leaps into the water to catch it . In that moment he feels grabbed by the leg and pulled down to the bottom . Everybody in Guernsey finds out about the shipwreck . Mess Lethierry is desperate to get the Durande s engine back . His niece declares she will marry the rescuer of the engine , and Mess Lethierry swears she will marry no other . Gilliat immediately takes up the mission , enduring hunger , thirst and cold trying to free the engine from the wreck . In a battle with an octopus , he finds the skeleton of Clubin and the stolen money on the bottom of the sea . Eventually he succeeds in returning the engine to Lethierry , who is very pleased and ready to honour his promise . Gilliat appears in front of the people as the rescuer but he declines to marry Deruchette because he had seen her accepting a marriage proposal made by Ebenezer Caudry , the young priest recently arrived on the island . He arranges their hurried wedding and helps them to run away on the sailing ship Cashmere . In the end , with all his dreams shattered , he decides to wait for the tide sitting on the Gild Holm Ur chair a rock in the sea and drowns as he watches the Cashmere disappear on the horizon .

<|childrens|>This story concerns the siblings Paul and Elisabeth who start this story without a father and with a bed ridden mother , whom Elisabeth looks after . At school Paul is obsessed with the feminine looking Dargelos , while Paul s school friend Gerard is enthralled by the siblings . However after Paul becomes ill when Dargelos throws a snowball with a stone inside at him , Elisabeth cares for both him and their mother . While nursing Paul they start an incestuous love and begin playing the game . The game devised by Paul and Elisabeth often involves the siblings trying to hurt each other s feelings , where the winner is the one that leaves the contest with the last word , a sense of superiority and ideally having caused a display of angry frustration from the other . This game continues after Paul recovers and their mother has died . Elisabeth soon takes up a job as a model , where she meets Agathe , a girl who was orphaned at a young age after her drug addicted parents committed suicide . Agathe , characterised by her strong resemblance to Dargelos , soon moves in with Paul and Elisabeth . Elisabeth is first to get married to a wealthy young man who dies on his way to a business meeting before the married couple can even enjoy a honeymoon . The result of the marriage is that the siblings inherit a large house which they move into . Paul soon finds himself in love with Agathe . Elisabeth cannot stand to see her brother happy , but there is also an element of it being a game to see how much hurt she can inflict . She manages to bully Gerard , who is in love with her , into marrying Agathe and as a result helps break her brother s heart . After Agathe and Gerard s marriage , Gerard meets with Dargelos , now a collector of poisons , and sends one of these poisons to Paul , also an enthusiast , as a gift . That poison is taken by Paul to end his life after writing of his love to Agathe . As Paul lies dying he is attended to by Agathe , who finds out about Elisabeth s scheme , and Elisabeth herself . In her final moments , knowing that Paul is dying , Elisabeth senses that this is yet another twist in the game and by dying he has beaten her to the final move . She then shoots herself and by a matter of seconds beats Paul , leaving a frightened Agathe with two dead bodies .

<|novel|>The protagonist is born in the mid 1960s . After her father s premature death when she is seven , she and her sister are brought up in England by their mother , who is a French Catholic . Conditioned to believe that pre marital sex is a sin , at 18 the heroine is forced into an early marriage with a teacher , who works literally day and night at a remote boarding school for boys . Stripped of her privacy and her youthful ways , she clings to her husband , hoping he will take a job elsewhere . When he does not she deserts him and embarks on a series of affairs with wealthy men who are not interested in a long term relationship with her a lawyer , a capitalist the Billionaire , a Lord . Similar to Caroline Meeber in Dreiser s Sister Carrie , the protagonist is not prepared to earn a living through honest work dependent on her qualifications . Accordingly , she always has to rely financially on the men in her life . In particular , it is the billionaire who , as a kind of parting present , volunteers to pay for her very expensive university education at some exclusive New York college as well as for her Upper East Side apartment . After her graduation the protagonist eventually moves back to London . An affair with a sexually inexperienced man the Virgin leads to her first pregnancy ever and a subsequent miscarriage . Having trained as an actress , she gets a few jobs in TV commercials . When she meets her ex husband again it is only to find out that he is going to get married again . At the end of the novel , aged about 38 and still indecisive , she meets a single father who might become her future partner .

<|fantasy|>On the distant planet Dreenor lives the most powerful species in the Galaxy . All of the Universe is the creation of the Dreens , who possess the power of idmaging , turning their thoughts into reality . They can create whole worlds , of which the wild , ungovernable planet Earth is one . But suddenly Earth is a threat , its people on the verge of discovering interstellar travel , and with it , of gaining access to Dreenor itself a paradox within a paradox , not to be permitted . While the elder Dreens plan Earth s destruction , a youngster , Ryll , embarks on an unauthorized jaunt across space . Forced for survival to merge bodies with an Earther whose mind is as strong as his own , he has to battle for control . And the future of all earthly life lies in the hand of a composite being , half wily , aggressive human , half naive adolescent alien , confused and far from home .

<|fantasy|>The plot involves a 24th century entrepreneur tycoon scientist , Simeon Krug , who has created a race of androids to serve humanity . Krug , probably Earth s wealthiest man , directs the construction of an immense tower of glass in the Canadian tundra . The edifice is not a monument , however , but a way to communicate with a distant planetary nebula , NGC 7293 , from which an intelligent though indecipherable message has been received . Krug is also building a starship to send there , which is to be crewed by androids in hibernation . The tower construction is directed by Krug s most faithful android , Alpha Thor Watchman . Thor and other leading androids have invented a secret religion for androids , based on the vision that their creator , Krug , intends to eventually make them equal to humans . Krug is unaware of the religion . Thor s dream is to convince him through indirect means , including the manipulation of his weak willed son and heir , Manuel , through a sexual relationship with a female android , Alpha Lilith Meson . Thor eventually falls in love with her , as does Manuel . After Thor and Lilith have manipulated Manuel into telling his father about the android religion , Krug insists that the minds of he and Thor be connected in the shunt room which allows one mind to probe another s a form of technologically enabled telepathy . Thor discovers via the link that Krug regards androids as mere things , and has no intention of treating them as equal to womb born humans . Realizing that Krug will never give freedom to androids , Thor despairs , loses his faith and announces Krug s true nature to androids worldwide . With the collapse of their religion , androids across all of Earth rebel . Many walk off their jobs , others take control of key Earth installations , and some even kill humans in their long suppressed rage . Thor then causes the fall of the nearly complete , 1 , 200 meter tall tower . An engraged Krug attacks Thor the latter , unable to fight his creator , is pushed into an unprogrammed teleporter and annihilated . Krug , his empire destroyed and humanity in grave danger , flees in his starship , alone , towards the star system from which the alien message was sent .

<|fantasy|>The storyline focuses on Maureen , an underage streetwalker who is stabbed by her pimp in a dark alley one night . Fortunately for Maureen , Lady Sally is nearby she had been walking her werebeagle . After defeating the pimp in hand to hand combat , Sally brings Maureen home . Her brothel has a fully functioning medical facility , where Maureen is treated and healed . She falls in love with the place for its ambiance and safety but is rejected as an employee for many reasons . Most importantly , she is underage but she also has severe self loathing issues . Lady Sally enjoys the fact that Maureen comes to accept and befriend the werebeagle and a talking German Shepherd but this is not enough let the main character stay . Maureen s old pimp tracks down the brothel and puts many of the visitors in danger . Maureen uses her wits to help defeat the man this convinces Sally to let her stay in a non sexual context . The plot skips to Maureen becoming eighteen , she is allowed to take on sexual duties . The rest of the plot focuses on three different subsequent incidents . There is Colt , a client with an unusual addiction that nobody seems to notice , one that presents various threats . Later , Maureen and her close friend Phillip swiftly realize that they are doing many things they do not wish to do over the course of their work day . The concept of being forced into it is something that Lady Callahan and her staff oppose in many , varied ways . Maureen and Phillip find that they are keeping quiet about this , even though they wish to tell everyone possible . The last incident focuses on Maureen s old friend , the Professor , who needs fifty thousand quick or he will die horribly . A very specific , very counterfeit fifty thousand . Like other books in the Callahan series , puns are a focus , sometimes seriously .

<|novel|>The novel depicts the inward journey of Mrs . Curren , an old classics professor . She lives in the Cape Town of the Apartheid era , where she is slowly dying of cancer . She has been philosophically opposed to the Apartheid regime her entire life , but has never taken an active stance against it . Now , at the end of her life , she finally comes face to face with the horrors of the system she witnesses the burning of a black township and the killing of her servant s son , as well as the shooting by security forces of a young black activist whom she shelters in her house . Against a backdrop of violence by whites and blacks alike , Mrs . Curren remembers her past and her daughter , who left South Africa because of the situation in the country the book is framed as an extended letter from the mother to her daughter in America . As the story progresses , she constructs a relationship of a different kind with Vercueil , an old homeless man who happens to be sleeping in her driveway , as well as finally becoming truly aware of Florence , her black live in servant . Coetzee brings together important themes in this book aging , the confessor as hero , narrative representation , the meaning of freedom , and the position of the white liberal in Apartheid South Africa . ISBN 0 14 027565 7 ca L edat de ferro eu Age of Iron Coetzee fa it Età di ferro

<|action|>Joel Backman is the Broker a Washington power broker lobbyist . But his life falls apart when a deal collapses involving a hacked spy satellite that nobody knows about , and Backman ends up in jail . Six years later , the political wheels in Washington have turned and other power hungry men are eager for his blood . Bargains are made and an outgoing disgraced president grants him a full pardon at the behest of the CIA and he finds himself spirited out of the prison in the middle of the night , bundled onto a military plane and flown to Italy for a new life . He has a new name and mysterious new friends who will teach him to speak the language and to blend in with the people of the city of Bologna . But something isn t quite kosher in this new setup , and he is under constant surveillance . In fact , his own government is setting him up for professional assassins from Russia , China , Israel , Saudi Arabia , and other countries . The CIA intends to sit back and wait to see which one gets him first , trying to solve the biggest mystery to hit the US government in decades seeing who built this seemingly impenetrable and most advanced satellite ever . It turns out to be China . Despite having low satellite technology , they stole the information from the U . S . Backman survives several assassination attempts and manages to establish communication with his son , Neal Backman . He escapes surveillance and returns to his home to contract a new deal with the US government . The CIA is told about the satellite , along with the taking of the program of the satellite itself .

<|fantasy|>The Circles who are appointed as priests leaders of Flatland due to their many sides , or an appearance thereof do not take A Square s revelation about a third dimension to be accurate , and A Square is ostracized by his community . Then after some time , society becomes more open to the ideas of Spaceland and , overall , to change and advancement . However , when a prominent surveyor finds a Triangle with more than 180 degrees , he is fired from his job and generally considered a crackpot , since such a construction is not possible in Euclidean geometry . He eventually makes friends with the grandson of A Square , A Hexagon , because he is a mathematician and scientist . Together , they come upon a theory to explain the unusual measurements they actually live on a very large sphere , and the Triangles have more than 180 degrees due to being inscribed on a non planar surface . With help from the sphere from the first novel , they are able to prove this theory . However , the established scientific community is not able to comprehend the idea proposed by the two , and thus they do not attempt to enlighten Flatland . Furthermore , as the residents of Flatland advance , they begin to travel in space they see distant worlds like their own , and the surveyor tries to find the distance between their world and these distant worlds , using trigonometry and radar . From his calculations , he and the hexagon determine that the universe is expanding again they try to reveal this theory to the outside world , but again it is not accepted . Therefore , like his grandfather in the previous novel , the hexagon writes a book that is not to be opened until the theory of the expanding universe is discovered and accepted by others . Then they live an inferior existence without any more contact with the sphere .

<|novel|>With the Peace of Amiens under strain and war with France under Napoleon Bonaparte imminent in May 1803 , Hornblower is promoted from Lieutenant to Commander and appointed to command the sloop HMS Hotspur . While readying for sea , he hastily marries Maria , the daughter of his landlady , at the Garrison Church , Portsmouth . However , Hornblower marries her not out of love but out of pity , and is forced to exercise his acting ability to make her believe that he genuinely loves her . Hotspur reconnoiters the approaches to the French naval base of Brest , and narrowly avoids capture when war is declared . Once the British fleet blockades Brest , Hornblower s restlessness and perfectionism prompts him to lead attacks and landing parties . In spite of gaining a good reputation , Hornblower makes no financial profit from his activities . When Admiral William Cornwallis tries to put him in a position where he can make easy prize money by capturing a large shipment of Spanish gold , he instead takes on a stronger enemy frigate sent to warn the convoy and keeps it from accomplishing its mission . Eventually , by superior seamanship and skill , he drives it away . Hornblower rationalises that this is poetic justice , after he had earlier connived to facilitate the escape of his steward , who was facing hanging for striking a superior officer a punishment Hornblower could not abide . It later transpires that the prize ships were claimed by the Admiralty Droits of Admiralty , as war had not been officially declared against Spain at the time of the capture , so Hornblower would not have profited in any case . Hornblower has a son , also named Horatio , and is recommended for promotion to Post Captain as one of the final acts of a retiring Admiral Cornwallis , a real figure outside of the Hornblower novels .

<|novel|>Across the River and Into the Trees begins in the first chapter with the frame story of 50 year old Colonel Cantwell s duckhunting trip to Trieste set in time present . In the second chapter , Hemingway moves Cantwell back in time with a stream of consciousness interior monologue , presenting an extended flashback and continues for 38 chapters . In the final six chapters Cantwell is presented again in the frame story set in the time present . Cantwell , who is dying of heart disease , spends a Sunday afternoon in a duck blind in Trieste . In the flashback he thinks of his recent weekend in Venice with 18 year old Renata , moving backward in time to ruminate about his experiences during the war . The novel ends with Cantwell suffering a series of fatal heart attacks as he leaves the duck blind .

<|childrens|>The novel begins with an oath signed by John Conlan and Lorraine Jensen , two high school sophomores , which pledge that they will report only the facts about their experiences with Mr . Pignati . When John , Lorraine , and two teen troublemakers , Norton Kelly and Dennis Kobin make prank phone calls , Lorraine picks out Mr . Pignati s phone number and pretends to be calling from a charity . Mr . Pignati offers to donate ten dollars , and John and Lorraine travel to his house to collect the funds . From the first meeting , the two teenagers and the old man become close friends . Mr . Pignati finds new vitality , and happily takes on the role of a father figure for the two teenagers . John and Lorraine s visits become increasingly frequent , and during one such visit , they discover the documents that show that Mr . Pignati s wife , Conchetta , is dead , not just on vacation as he had previously told them . Soon , John and Lorraine visit him every day after school , and he showers them with gifts , food , and most importantly , the love and attention they do not receive in their own joyless homes . They reveal to him that they were never affiliated with any charity , and he reveals what they already know his wife is dead . Mr . Pignati suffers a heart attack while he and the teens are playing tag with roller skates , and he s sent to the hospital John and Lorraine agree to take care of his house while he recovers . The true betrayal comes when John invites friends over to Mr . Pignati s house . The situation quickly turns into a drunken , boisterous party . Lorraine s friend rips one of Conchetta Pignati s dresses . Norton ransacks Mr . Pignati s house and destroys Conchetta s collection of porcelain pigs , which Mr . Pignati holds very dear to him . John beats him up in retaliation . Mr . Pignati returns to find his house ransacked , and is incredibly hurt when he finds out John and Lorraine were responsible for the incident . Feeling terrible , the two offer to take him to the zoo to help make up for it . At the zoo , they discover that Bobo the baboon , Mr . Pignati s favorite animal and buddy , has died . Overcome with grief and the heaviness of the recent events , Mr . Pignati suffers a cardiac arrest and dies , leaving John and Lorraine grieving and reflecting on the fragility of life .

<|fantasy|>Inkheart follows the adventures of a 12 year old girl named Meggie Folchart . Her life changes dramatically when she discovers that her father , a bookbinder named Mortimer , or Mo as Meggie always calls him , has an unusual ability which is that when he reads aloud , he can bring characters and items from books into the real world . When Meggie was three years old , Mo read a book called Inkheart aloud to her mother . In an instant , Meggie s mother , Resa , and the family s two pet cats vanished into the Inkworld and three men from the novel two of whom are murderous villains entered into the real world . Nine years later , these men have come back into their lives and Mo , Meggie , and Resa s aunt Elinor need to return the villains back to the book s pages .

<|mystery|>According to the biography in the book , this was Ray Bradbury s first novel since the publication of Something Wicked This Way Comes not counting the young adult novel The Halloween Tree . It evokes both the milieu and style of other mystery writers Raymond Chandler , Dashiell Hammett , James M . Cain , and Ross Macdonald , all of whom Bradbury names in the book s dedication , and James Crumley , after whom Bradbury named his detective . Yet the main character is undoubtedly Bradbury himself , portrayed in a period of his life just before his marriage and his success with The Martian Chronicles . Two sequels followed A Graveyard for Lunatics 1990 , and Let s All Kill Constance 2003 , advancing the writer s career to 1954 and 1960 , respectively .

<|fantasy|>Birthright spans a timeline of nearly 17 millennia , beginning at a very early stage of expansion from Earth and ending with the death of the last humans . In between , it chronicles a slow but despite some set backs steady conquest of the entire galaxy inhabited by thousands of sentient alien races , which are overpowered and oppressed using whatever tool it takes economic pressure , diplomatic finesse , or simple military power . Not all chapters deal with mankind s treatment of aliens some also cover the internal politics that result in a development of the growing human empire from a democracy to a monarchy . But the biggest theme is undeniably the search for the elusive quality that allows mankind to overcome all opposition and manage the unique feat of conquering the entire galaxy . It is never clearly defined but manifests perhaps most succinctly when it also results in the failure of an attempt to cross the void between galaxies . Then , after there is no more room for conquest , the only way left is down internal struggles as well as deep seated resentment of aliens result in a decline of human power that takes nearly as long as the rise , but is described far less extensively . Somehow , despite whatever enabled humans to achieve total power , they were unable to keep it . Displaying a particular brand of irony , one of the chapters reveals the literary genre of fiction as another of mankind s peculiarities , not shared by any alien race .

<|novel|>Set initially in Bideford in North Devon during the reign of Elizabeth I , Westward Ho ! follows the adventures of Amyas Leigh , an unruly child who as a young man follows Francis Drake to sea . Amyas loves local beauty Rose Salterne , as does nearly everyone else . Much of the novel involves the kidnap of Rose by a Spaniard . Amyas spends time in the Caribbean seeking gold , and eventually returns to England at the time of the Spanish Armada , finding his true love , the beautiful Indian maiden Ayacanora , in the process yet fate had blundered and brought misfortune into Amyas s life , for not only had he been blinded by a freak bolt of lightning at sea , but he also loses his brother Frank Leigh and Rose Salterne , who were caught by the Spaniards and burnt at the stake by the Inquisition .

<|childrens|>India Opal Buloni is a 10 year old girl who has just moved to a trailer park in the small town of Naomi , Florida , with her itinerant preacher father . While in the Winn Dixie supermarket , she encounters a scruffy dog wreaking havoc . She claims the dog is hers to save it from go ing to the pound and names it Winn Dixie . Winn Dixie s first act of inspiration on Opal is for her to challenge her father to name ten things about her mother , who abandoned them years before when she became an alcoholic . Opal also befriends the very wealthy librarian Miss Franny Block , who shares great stories about her past , including a tale about her great grandfather , whose family members died while he fought for the South in the Civil War . Grief stricken after his return from battle , he decided he wanted to live the remainder of his life filled with sweetness . Thus , he invented Littmus Lozenge candies that tasted like a combination of rootbeer and strawberry with a secret ingredient mixed in sorrow . In Because of Winn Dixie , these candies symbolize that even though life sometimes deals people a bit of sadness , there is always so much to appreciate . She also encounters Gloria Dump , a woman whom children think is a witch . She also meets a man named Otis . Otis is the pet shop manager in the town of Naomi . He is shy and upset because he was in jail for playing his guitar on the street , so now he plays for the pet shop animals and a parrot named Gertrude who is Otis favorite .

<|fantasy|>Eight year old Princess Irene lives a lonely life in a wild , desolate , mountainous kingdom , with only her nursemaid , Lootie for company . Due to her sheltered upbringing , her father being absent attending to affairs of state and her mother being dead , Irene has never known about the existence of the goblins , which lurk in the underground mines . These goblins also known as gnomes or kobolds are grotesque and hideous beings , who centuries ago were once human , but due to varying reasons , were driven underground and were malformed and distorted by their new lifestyle . This caused them to despise the humans above the ground and vow revenge against them . Irene and Lootie ndash who knows of the goblins ndash stay out late one night and are chased by the goblins , who only appear on the surface at night as sunshine repulses them . Lootie and Irene barely escape the goblins after a miner s child , a boy named Curdie Peterson , appears and sings loudly to the goblins , which drives them away . Curdie states that goblins are repelled by singing , and he and Irene begin to become friends . However , Curdie soon discovers , after he ventures into the mines and accidentally enters the realm of the goblins , that the goblins are planning a war against the humans on the surface , where they plot to abduct the Princess and marry her to Prince Harelip , the heir to the throne of the goblin kingdom , therefore forcing the humans to accept the goblins as their rulers . The driving force behind this scheme is the vile Goblin Queen , the stepmother of Harelip , who hides a secret ndash she has toes , a physical trait that goblins do not have and therefore regard with disgust . WIth the help of Irene s ethereal great great grandmother , the Princess and Curdie must hatch a plan to defeat the goblins and save the kingdom .

<|novel|>The book is a lyrical account of the life of Mohammed Ahmed , the eighth daughter of Hajji Ahmed Suleyman . Frustrated by his failure to bring a son into the world , Ahmed is determined that his youngest daughter will be raised as a boy , with all the rights and privileges that go along with it . The first part of the book describes the father s efforts to thwart suspicion that this is a boy , especially from his jealous brothers , who look to inherit Ahmed s fortune . Using bribery and deceit , the masquerade succeeds . Mohammed Ahmed is circumcised blood is drawn from his imaginary penis when Ahmed intentionally cuts his finger over the child during the ceremony , his breasts are bound , and he even marries his cousin Fatima , a sickly epileptic girl , who dies young . Only the father , the mother , and the midwife are ever aware of the hoax that is being perpetrated . The story is told by a wandering storyteller , who reveals his tale , bit by bit , to an enthusiastic , though sometimes skeptical audience . To verify his story , he claims to quote from a journal that Mohammed Ahmed kept , revealing his innermost thoughts about his confused gender identity . Mohammed Ahmed also reveals himself through correspondence with a mysterious friend , who writes him letters challenging his identity . The book changes direction after Fatima s death and the disappearance of the storyteller , forced away by the modernization of the country . The remainder of the journal has been lost , but some of the crowd that once listened to the storyteller continues to meet and share how they see the story ending . Each of them describes Mohammed Ahmed s transition back to womanhood , where she assumes the identity of Zahra . Their stories have different endings , some happy , others tragic , until a blind troubador , a fictionalised version of Jorge Luis Borges , continues the tale leading up to Mohammed Ahmed Zahra s death . ca L infant de sorra

<|fantasy|>Cowperwood moves to Chicago with his new wife Aileen . He decides to take over the street railway system . He bankrupts several opponents with the help of John J . McKenty and other political allies . Meanwhile , Chicago society finds out about his past in Philadelphia and the couple are no longer invited to dinner parties after a while , the press turns on him too . Cowperwood is unfaithful many times . Aileen finds out about a certain Rita and beats her up . She gives up on him and has an affair with Polk Lynde , a man of privilege she eventually loses faith in him . Meanwhile , Cowperwood meets young Berenice Fleming by the end of the novel , he tells her he loves her and she consents to live with him . However , the ending is bittersweet as Cowperwood has not managed to obtain the fifty year franchise for his railway schemes that he wanted .

<|crime|>Set in mountainous Sevier County , Tennessee in the 1960s , Child of God tells the story of Lester Ballard , a dispossessed , violent man whom the narrator describes as a child of God much like yourself perhaps . Ballard s life is a disastrous attempt to exist outside the social order . Successively deprived of parents and homes and with few other ties , Ballard descends literally and figuratively to the level of a cave dweller as he falls deeper into crime and degradation . The novel is structured in three segments , each segment describing the ever growing isolation of the protagonist from the society . In the first part of the novel , we have a group of unidentified narrators from Sevierville who retrospectively tell us about and frame Lester within that community s mythology and historical consciousness . The second and third parts of the novel increasingly leave culture and community behind as Lester goes from squatter to cave dweller to serial killer and necrophile as he becomes increasingly associated with pre modern and inanimate phenomena . The novel ends with the dehumanized and mutilated Ballard dying in incarceration , while the long hidden corpses of his victims are unearthed from his subterranean haunt .

<|novel|>The novel begins with Suttree observing police as they pull a suicide from the river . Suttree is living alone in a houseboat , on the fringes of society on the Tennessee River , earning money by fishing for the occasional catfish . He has left a life of luxury , rejecting his father and family , and abandoning his wife and son . A large cast of characters , largely misfits and grotesques , is introduced , one of which is Gene Harrogate , whom Suttree meets in a work camp . Harrogate was sent to the work camp for having sex with a farmer s watermelons . Harrogate is referred to as the moonlight melonmounter . Suttree attempts to help Harrogate once he is released from the work camp , but this task proves to be in vain as Harrogate sets off on a series of misadventures , including using poisoned meat and a slingshot to kill bats flitter mice as Harrogate calls them to earn a bounty on them , and using dynamite to attempt to tunnel underneath the city . Other prominent characters are prostitutes , hermits , and an aged Geechee witch . His relationships with women all come to bad ends . One prostitute girlfriend terminates the relationship in a moment of madness , smashing up the inside of their new car . The other woman with whom he becomes involved is killed by a landslide on the river bank . Suttree is also married before the book begins with a woman he apparently met during college . He left his wife with a son , who dies early on in the book . Towards the novel s end , Suttree falls ill with typhoid fever and suffers a lengthy hallucination . This occurs after a black friend of Suttree s is killed in a fight with the police and his other friend Harrogate is arrested for robbing a store , so Suttree decides to leave town . In the end , he feels his identity is reaffirmed , and he leaves Knoxville , possibly for good .

<|novel|>The story opens in 1952 . John Grady and Billy work together on a cattle ranch south of Alamogordo , New Mexico , not far from the border cities of El Paso , Texas , and Ciudad Juárez in the state of Chihuahua , Mexico . The ranch s owners are kind , but face an uncertain future in a dying industry . Recently devastated by drought , cattle ranches around El Paso are struggling , and may be claimed by the Department of Defense to become military areas through eminent domain . Though the cowboys barely make a living , John Grady and Billy love life on the open range , and John Grady as detailed in All the Pretty Horses is a master at training horses . During a visit to a brothel in Juárez , John Grady falls in love with a young , epileptic prostitute , Magdalena . The couple plans to marry and live in the U . S . , and John Grady renovates an abandoned cabin , turning it into a home . But Magdalena s brothel is run by Eduardo , a formidable adversary also in love with the young girl . Billy attempts to dissuade John Grady , but feels obligated to help the couple . Eduardo s sidekick , Tiburcio , murders Magdalena by cutting her throat after she steals away from the brothel to meet John Grady at a Rio Grande river crossing and leave Mexico . After John Grady finds her body in the morgue , he faces Eduardo in a knife fight reminiscent of his prison showdown in All the Pretty Horses . Though John Grady kills Eduardo , he is mortally wounded in the fight . He survives long enough to contact Billy , who hurries to comfort him before his death . After John Grady s death , a short epilogue not unlike the conclusion of Blood Meridian details the next several decades of Billy s life in a few pages . After drifting across the Southwest for many years working ranches and living in hotels , Billy , homeless , takes shelter beneath a highway underpass . There , he meets a mysterious man who tells him about a convoluted dream . Though the man denies it , Billy suspects that he is Death . However , Billy survives the meeting with the man and finds shelter and a new life with a family who takes him in .

<|novel|>This novel deals with the attempts of the son of fictional Chola king Parthiban , Vikraman , to attain independence from the Pallava ruler , Narasimhavarman . The Cholas remain vassals of the Pallavas . Parthiban conveys his dream of the Chola dynasty regaining its glory which he believes is lost since they are no longer the independent rulers of their land to his young son Vikraman . Parthiban refuses to pay the taxes to the Pallavas and this triggers the Pallavas to wage war against the Cholas . In the resulting war Parthiban is killed and in the battlefield an enigmatic monk promises to Parthiban that he will make sure that Vikraman fulfills Parthiban s dream . Vikraman grows up and plans his retaliation against Narasimhavarman . But his uncle , Marappa Bhupathi , betrays him and Vikraman is arrested and banished from India by Narasimhavarman . The narrative moves on to describe how Vikraman comes back longing to meet his mother and the mysterious beauty whom he saw before being deported . To his woe he later discovers that his mother has disappeared and has in fact been kidnapped by the savage Kapalikas a tribe which believes in human sacrifice . He also comes to know that the beauty he has fallen for , Kundhavi , is none other than the daughter of his sworn enemy , Narasimhavarman . The novel climaxes with the identity of the monk being finally being revealed as pallava king , Narasimhavarman and establishment of the independent Chola kingdom under Vikraman in Uraiyur . Vikraman also marries kundhavi in the final chapter .

<|novel|>The novel opens with a brief prologue set in 1957 in which the narrator , an Italian Jew , describes a visit to the Ferrara cemetery where the Finzi Contini family mausoleum stands , empty in all but two slots a young child , Guido , who died of illness before the narrator was born and Alberto , the son of the Finzi Continis and a friend of the narrator s , who died of lymphogranulomatosis Hodgkin s disease before the mass deportation that sent the remainder of the family to a concentration camp in Germany . At this point , the narrator reveals that none of the Finzi Continis survived . The first part of the book covers the narrator s childhood experiences , describing the various social circles of the local Jewish population and the mystery around the Finzi Contini children , Alberto and Micòl , who were schooled separately from the other Jewish children and who only appeared at the main school for the annual exams . The narrator fails his math test in this particular year , the first time he has failed any of the annual exams required for promotion , and he takes off on his bike out of fear of his father s reaction . He ends up outside the walls of the Finzi Continis mansion , where he has a conversation with Micòl , the Finzi Continis pretty daughter . The narrator is invited by Micòl to enter the garden . He excuses himself out of concern for the safety of his bicycle . She then comes over the wall to show him a safe hiding place , but while hiding his bike he dallies in contemplation of Micòl and loses his chance to see the garden until years later . The next two parts of the book cover the years when the children are all in or just out of college . The racial laws have restricted their ability to socialize with the Ferrarese Christians , and so the narrator , Alberto , Micòl , and Giampi Malnate an older Christian friend with socialist views form an informal tennis club of their own , playing several times a week at the court in the Finzi Continis garden . During these visits , the narrator declares , shyly at first but more and more forcefully , his love for Micòl . However , her attitude towards the narrator remains one of friendship so that the relationship slowly peters out . The final section of the book covers the slow fading of the narrator s involvement in the tennis club , his futile attempts to restart the romance with Micòl , and his growing friendship with Malnate whom he suspects at the end of the book of having an affair with Micòl .

<|fantasy|>The plot concerns a young woman biochemist who discovers that a chemical extracted from an unusual strain of lichen hence the title can be used to retard the ageing process , enabling people to live to around 200 300 years . Wyndham speculates how society would deal with this prospect . The two central characters are Diana Brackley and Francis Saxover , two biochemists who run parallel investigations into the properties of a specific species of lichen after Diana notices that a trace of the specimen prevents some milk turning sour . She and Francis separately manage to extract from the lichen a new drug , dubbed Antigerone , which slows down the body s ageing process . While Francis uses it only on himself and his immediate family without their knowledge , Diana founds a cosmetic spa , and builds up a clientele of some of the most powerful women in England , giving them low doses of Antigerone , preserving their beauty and youth . When Saxover finds out about the spas , he erroneously assumes that Diana s motive is profit . Diana s aim , however , is actually female empowerment , intending to gain the support of these influential women , believing that if Antigerone became publicly known , it would be reserved only for the men in power . After a customer suffers an allergic reaction to one of Diana s products , the secret of the drug begins to emerge . Diana tries to cover up the real source of the drug , since the lichen is very rare and difficult to grow , but when it is finally discovered , she fakes her own death , in the hope of inspiring the women of Britain to fight for the rights she tried to secure for them . Francis realises that she may not really be dead , and tracks her down to a remote farm , where she has succeeded in growing a small amount of the lichen . Diana plans to rejoin the world under the guise of being her own sister , and continue the work she left off .

<|fantasy|>It is a future history , set from 1994 to 2194 . It tells the story , with chapters at 50 year intervals , of the exploration of the solar system , with space stations in Earth orbit , then moon bases , and landings on Mars in 2094 , Venus in 2144 , and the asteroids . This is told through the Troon family , several members of which play an important part in the exploration of space , since they all feel the outward urge , the desire to travel further into space . They all hear the thin gnat voices cry , star to faint star across the sky , a quote from The Jolly Company by Rupert Brooke . In 1994 Ticker Troon is killed foiling a Soviet missile attack on a British space station , and is later awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross . In 2044 a major nuclear war between the USSR and the West wipes out most of the Northern Hemisphere . Inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere virtually the only survivors of humanity call it The Great Northern War , the far earlier war of the same name seeming very minor in comparison . Only after hundreds of years , with radioactivity going down , do expeditions from the south start carefully exploring and preparing to re colonise the ravaged northern hemisphere . Brazil is left as the main world power , which then claims that Space is a province of Brazil . However Australia eventually emerges as a serious rival . Consequently , English and Portuguese become contenders for the position of the major world wide eventually , Solar System wide language . Eventually , space explorers break away from the tutelage of both earthbound powers and establish themselves as a major third power , called simply Space the Troon Family plays a major role in this as in many other events .

<|mystery|>The novel is divided into four sections . Each detail a particular day in the four months that spanned the summer of 1958 . In June takes up half of the book and shows the narrator meeting up with various teenaged friends and some adults in various parts of London and discussing his outlook on life and the new concept of being a teenager . He also learns that his ex girlfriend , Suzette , is to enter a marriage of convenience with her boss , a middle aged gay fashion designer called Henley . In July has the narrator taking photographs by the Thames , seeing the musical operetta H . M . S . Pinafore with his father , has a violent encounter with Ed the Ted and watches Hoplite s appearance on Call Me Cobber s TV show . In August has the narrator and his father take a cruise along the Thames towards Windsor Castle . His father is taken ill on the trip and has to be taken to a doctor . The narrator also finds Suzette at her husband s cottage in Cookham . In September is set on the narrator s nineteenth birthday . He sees this , symbolically , as the beginning of his last year as a teenager . He witnesses several incidents of racial violence , which disgust him . His father also dies , leaving him four envelopes stuffed with money . Suzette has separated from Henley , but still seems uncertain as to whether she should resume her relationship with the narrator . The narrator decides to leave the country and find a place where racism doesn t exist . At the airport , he sees Africans arriving and gives them a warm welcome .

<|fantasy|>Trelane , who first appeared in the original Star Trek episode The Squire of Gothos , is revealed to be a member of the Q Continuum . He taps into the power of the continuum and uses this ability to tamper with time and reality , resulting in the intersection of three different parallel universes which are also referred to as time tracks . Track A is a universe in which Beverly Crusher s husband Jack never died , and now serves as captain of the Enterprise with Jean Luc Picard as his first officer in this universe , Jack s son Wesley died as a boy and Jack and Beverly divorced . Track B is the traditional universe depicted on Star Trek The Next Generation . Track C is akin to the more militaristic alternate universe shown in the Next Generation episode Yesterday s Enterprise , in which the Federation is at war with the Klingons . Q , who had been charged with the task of mentoring Trelane a task each adult Q must accept at least once for an adolescent Q , enlists the aid of Picard and the crew of the Enterprise D in the three different timelines in order to teach Trelane discipline , and eventually , to stop him from destroying the fabric of the universe by collapsing the alternate universes together . When the tracks begin to merge , the characters from separate universes begin to appear to one another , sometimes with disastrous results . Jack Crusher confronts his ex wife about the affair she is having with Track A Picard during the argument , which Track B Picard witnesses , she is accidentally killed additionally , members of Track C attempt to kill Worf , and believe all the members of the crew from the other two universes are really Klingon impostors . Eventually , Q manages to overpower Trelane and the universes are once again separated , though not always perfectly at the end of the novel , Track A Data appears to be stuck in Track C . Q also spends part of the novel lost in time and space , trapped by the barrier around the galaxy this relates to the original series episode Where No Man Has Gone Before .

<|childrens|>Two nine year old girls rude Lisa Palfy orig . Luise Palfy from Vienna , and respectful shy Lottie Horn orig . Lotte Körner from Munich meet on a summer camp in Bohrlaken on Lake Bohren orig . Seebühl am Bühlsee . Lisa has curly hair Lottie wears braids . Apart from that , they look alike . They have never seen each other before , but soon find out that they are identical twins . It turns out that their parents divorced , each keeping one of the girls . The two girls decide it is unfair that neither of them has ever been told that she is a twin , or that her other parent is still living . They decide to trade places at the end of the summer so that Lottie will have a chance to get to know her father and Lisa will get to meet her mother . Lottie curls her hair , Lisa braids hers , and both go off to where they have never been before . The adventure begins . While many adults are surprised at the changes in each of the girls after they return from camp Lottie has suddenly forgotten how to cook , gets in a fight at school , and becomes a terrible student , while Lisa has begun to keep a close eye on the housekeeper s bookkeeping , will no longer eat her favorite food , and becomes a model student , no one suspects that the girls are not who they claim to be . When Lottie pretending to be Lisa finds out that her father is planning to remarry , she becomes very ill and stops writing to her sister in Munich . Meanwhile , Lottie s mother comes across a picture of the two girls that was taken while they were at summer camp . She quickly realizes what has happened and Lisa tells her the entire story . The discovery turns out to have come just in time . The girls mother calls her ex husband in Vienna to tell him what has happened and to find out why Lottie has stopped writing . When she hears that her daughter is ill , she and Lisa immediately travel to Vienna to be with her . The four of them father , mother , Lisa and Lottie are still in Vienna for the girls birthday . The girls tell their parents that they don t need any presents on this birthday or ever again as long as they don t have to be separated again . The parents talk it over , realize that they are still in love and decide to get remarried .

<|novel|>Naomis story is focused around a man s obsession for a modan garu or modern girl . The main character , Jōji , is a well educated Japanese man who is an electrical engineer in the city , and comes from a wealthy landlord family . Jōji wishes to break away from his traditional Japanese culture , and becomes immersed in the strange new Westernized culture which was beginning to form in Japan . The physical representation of everything Western is embodied in a young girl named Naomi . Jōji sees Naomi for the first time in a café and instantly falls for her exotic Eurasian looks , Western sounding name , and sophisticated mannerisms . Like the story of the prepubescent Murasaki in the classic novel The Tale of Genji , Jōji decides he will raise Naomi , a fifteen year old bar hostess , to be his perfect woman in this case he will forge her into a glamorous Western girl like Mary Pickford , a famous Canadian actress of the silent film era . Jōji moves Naomi into his home and begins his efforts to make her a perfect Western wife . She turns out to be a very willing pupil . He pays for her English education , and though she has little grammar skills in it , she possesses beautiful pronunciation . He funds her Western activities , including her love of the theatre , dancing and magazines . During the early part of the novel Jōji makes no sexual advances on Naomi , preferring instead to groom her according to his desires and observe her from a distance . However , his plan to foster Western ideals such as independence in her backfires dramatically as she gets older . Jōji begins the novel being the dominator . However , as time progresses and his obsession takes hold , Naomi s manipulation puts her in a position of power over him . Slowly Jōji turns power over to Naomi , conceding to everything she desires . He buys a new house for them , and though they are married , Jōji sleeps in a separate bedroom , while Naomi entertains Western visitors in another room . The book ends with Naomi having complete control of Jōji s life , though he claims he is satisfied as long as his obsession with her is satiated .

<|novel|>Alton Locke is the story of a young tailor boy who has instincts and aspirations beyond the normal expectations of his working class background . He is intensely patriotic and has ambitions to be a poet . In the course of the narrative , Alton Locke loves and struggles in vain . Physically , he is a weak man , but is able to encompass all the best emotions , along with vain longings , wild hopes , and a righteous indignation at the plight of his contemporaries . He joins the Chartist movement because he can find no better vehicle by which to improve the lot of the working class , experiencing a sense of devastation at its apparent failure . Utterly broken in spirit , Alton Locke sails for America to seek a new life there however , he barely reaches the shore of the New World before he dies .

<|fantasy|>Paladin of Souls is a sequel to The Curse of Chalion and is set some three years after the events of that novel . It follows Ista , mother of the girl who became Royina Queen in that book and a minor character in it . Recovering from the extreme guilt and grief that had marked her as mad while the Golden General s curse on her family persisted , she finds herself bored to distraction and restless . To get away from her home town , Valenda , and its ugly memories she sets out on a religious pilgrimage with the dy Gura brothers also minor characters from the earlier story for protection Liss , a feisty and clever courier girl and dy Cabon , a plump priest of the Bastard one of the five gods as her spiritual guide . The Bastard , god of disasters and of things out of season , becomes a larger presence in this novel than was The Lady of Spring in The Curse of Chalion by its end , Ista herself has become a saint in his service . The Father of Winter , another of the five gods , also makes a brief appearance . The pilgrimage party is overrun and captured by a troop of Roknari raiders from the adjacent principality of Jokona , then set free by a patrol from nearby Castle Porifors . Leading the rescuers is Arhys , lord of the castle and a very effective warrior indeed considering that he scarcely eats or drinks , or sleeps except for brief afternoon naps . Though she comes to be immensely attracted to him , she realizes in horror that he is the son of a man she had helped murder . Another obstacle is Arhys s very young and very beautiful wife , Cattilara . Once in the castle Ista discovers another odd man Lord Illvin , Arhys s half brother . He is unconscious except for afternoon wakings that match Arhys naps . She has seen him before , though , in a baffling dream that at last makes some sense . As this mystery begins to come clear , Castle Porifors is besieged by a new force of Roknari from Jokona that includes its Prince , Sordso , and his mother , Princess Joen . The latter is an elderly , minor daughter of the Golden General and has accumulated a whole troop of demon ridden magicians , including her son , all of them controlled by one major magician herself . As Castle Porifors and its defenders crumble under magical siege , Lord Arhys and a picked troop make a night raid that jolts the Jokonans but does not dislodge them . Only when Ista allows herself to walk as a hostage into the Princess lair is the siege ended . The remaining magicians demons are sent back to the Bastard s care , and the remaining loose ends of the story are resolved , with Ista s acceptance of the Bastard s offer of skills and a job that give use and meaning to the rest of her life . Lord Illvin comes with the job as a bonus .

<|novel|>According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature 1967 , the plot is founded on a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans , a Methodist preacher , and the original of Dinah Morris of the novel , of a confession of child murder , made to her by a girl in prison . The story s plot follows four characters rural lives in the fictional community of Hayslope mdash a rural , pastoral and close knit community in 1799 . The novel revolves around a love rectangle between beautiful but self absorbed Hetty Sorrel , Captain Arthur Donnithorne , the young squire who seduces her , Adam Bede , her unacknowledged suitor , and Dinah Morris , Hetty s cousin , a fervent , virtuous and beautiful Methodist lay preacher . The real village where Adam Bede was set is Ellastone on the Staffordshire Derbyshire border , a few miles from Uttoxeter and Ashbourne , and near to Alton Towers . Eliot s father lived in the village as a carpenter in a substantial house now known as Adam Bede s Cottage . Adam is a local carpenter much admired for his integrity and intelligence , in love with Hetty . She is attracted to Arthur , the charming local squire s grandson and heir , and falls in love with him . When Adam interrupts a tryst between them , Adam and Arthur fight . Arthur agrees to give up Hetty and leaves Hayslope to return to his militia . After he leaves , Hetty Sorrel agrees to marry Adam but shortly before their marriage , discovers she is pregnant . In desperation , she leaves in search of Arthur . She cannot find him unwilling to return to the village on account of the shame and ostracism she would have to endure , she delivers her baby with the assistance of a friendly woman she encounters . Later , the child is killed when she abandons it in a field . Not being able to bear the child s cries she tries to come back but she is too late when she finds out that it dies of exposure . Hetty is caught and tried for child murder . She is found guilty and sentenced to hang . Dinah enters the prison and pledges to stay with Hetty until the end . Her compassion brings about Hetty s contrite confession . When Arthur Donnithorne , on leave from the militia for his grandfather s funeral , hears of her impending execution , he races to the court and has the sentence commuted to transportation . Ultimately , Adam and Dinah , who gradually become aware of their mutual love , marry and live peacefully with his family .

<|novel|>Guy Openshaw is 44 years old and on his death bed . Cancer is coming down hard on Guy , and he cannot stand the stream of visitors to his London flat . His wife Gertrude entertains the drop ins , who were once part of a lively set that came by after work hours for a drink and chat . The visitors all relied on Guy for advice and money , and as he dies the varied people in the novel begin to fray . One of the visitors to the Openshaw flat is the youngish Tim Reede , an artist who cannot sell his work and who is lost without Guy s support . He has a girlfriend named Daisy who dresses like a punk and talks and drinks like a sailor they re a perfect pair of starving misfits . Daisy makes Tim visit Gertrude once Guy has passed and ask her for money , but Gertrude begins questioning Tim about his craft and winds up wanting to support him in other ways , namely giving him run of her home in the French countryside . The Tim Gertrude affair and subsequent marriage is the heart of the book , and it is a good study of class relations and the younger man older woman romance . Tim is both a hero and a colossal screw up , but he is also kind and lets Gertrude s friends run him down because it doesn t bother her and he still gets to be with her at the end of the day . Some of Gertrude s circle are genuinely concerned , but most are either in love with her or what she could do for them with Guy s inheritance . There is a fair amount of treachery and coincidence in the novel , but the heavy touches are softened by consequences which Murdoch lets play out in natural time .

<|childrens|>A green baby caterpillar hatches from an egg , and from birth he experiences a humongous and perpetual craving for food . He consumes enormous quantities of multiple different types of foods until inadvertently nauseating itself , so he spins a cocoon in which he remains for the following two weeks . Later , the caterpillar emerges as a bright , colorful butterfly with big gorgeous multi colored wings .

<|action|>The novel centers around the investigation of a medical student named Sean into a mysterious cancer called medulloblastoma and the secret behind the hundred percent remission treatment offered by a medical institute called Forbes Cancer Centre . In his investigation , Sean learns that the institute is responsible for the creation of the cancer . The secret behind their offering of 100 remission of the disease is that the creators had also invented an antibody to the disease . The institute procured Social Security numbers and other identifying details of wealthy people and their dependents , and as opportunities arose from those people undergoing surgeries or being on IV therapy , they were infected with the transformed St . Louis encephalitis virus . Because the virus was encephalotropic , it manifested with early neural symptoms in the infected patients , in the form of seizures and convulsions . The infected people , once they were completely cured of the disease , were usually willing to donate large sums to the Forbes . This book heavily deals with the controversial issues of the time . hu Haláltusa regény nl Terminaal boek

<|fantasy|>Gary spends time playing football , picnicking with a girl named Myna , and contemplating nuclear warfare . Its meditative but ultimately playful nature , spry dialogue , and deep but mostly unconnected themes make End Zone perhaps the most easily accessible of DeLillo s early works . The metaphor of football as warfare is challenged in the line warfare is warfare .

<|comedy|>Death Rat ! is primarily a satire , with its main subject being the state of Minnesota , where Nelson lives . Among his targets Nelson includes parodies of famous Minnesota residents like Prince and Garrison Keillor , as well as the attitudes and quirks of Minnesotans in general . The protagonist of Mike Nelson s Death Rat ! is Pontius Feeb , usually called Ponty , an author of many historical treatises who has just been fired . While working in a fast food restaurant he gets the idea to write a novel of historical fiction based in the small town of Holey , Minnesota . Feeb s novel revolves around the conflict between two citizens of Holey in the early 1900s , as well as a giant rodent from which the novel gets its name . However , when he tries to sell the novel to a publisher , he is told that he doesn t look right to be the author of an action novel . Feeb then enlists the help of local actor Jack Ryback to pretend he wrote the book and attempt to sell it . Jack sells the novel easily , but tells the publisher that it is a non fiction book , instead of a novel . Jack and Pontius then work with the citizens of Holey to attempt to cover up the book s fictional nature . During their many visits to Holey , Ponty becomes friendly with the town s female mayor . As Feeb s Death Rat grows in popularity , the cover up becomes harder and harder to maintain , as the rock star King Leo adopts the book as the scripture of a new religion , and sets up a revival in Holey . Meanwhile , a rival Minnesotan author is trying desperately to discredit Jack and his book . In the end the plot is revealed , And after a flurry of lawsuits and media attention Jack and Pontius go back to doing minimum wage work in St . Paul . In the end , Ponty decides to go live in Holey with the friends that he made there .

<|novel|>The story begins with Surprise in the Strait of Magellan , caught up in foul weather . Hanson first spots Cape Pilar at the very opening of the Strait , and soon Surprise moors and conducts some trade with the inhospitable locals for meat and vegetables . Having re provisioned , she and Ringle sail northwards in fine weather until they enter the River Plate and moor close to the island functioning as the main administrative centre . A quarantine officer comes aboard , a Dr Quental , and gives the frigate a clean bill of health . Wantage informs Maturin of a rumpus in the town a fight between Protestant mariners from a Boston barque clash with the Catholic locals over the right of polygamy . Further signs of local resentment emerge when a large scow dumps the town s filth next to the frigate and the Portuguese sailors shout abuse at the Surprises . Aubrey spots a black Legate and recognises him as his own natural son , Sam . The Most Reverend Doctor Samuel Mputa , the Papal Nuncio to the Republic of Argentina , has recently saved the government from an open rebellion . The South African squadron , under its Commander in Chief Admiral Lord Leyton , finally makes its appearance and the crew of Surprise bring their ship up to a high state of perfection . Jack makes his appearance on board HMS Suffolk and sees his rear admiral s blue flag hoisted on the flagship . He then has an interview with the somewhat cantankerous Admiral , who instructs him to ask Stephen if two of his officers can sail on Surprise now a private vessel once more back to England . While the fleet re provisions , Ringle sails off under the steady and capable Lieutenant Harding , and later returns with Sophie Aubrey , Christine Wood , her brother Edward and the three children Brigid Maturin and Fanny and Charlotte Aubrey who will sail on with Jack and Stephen to South Africa . The final chapters end with an Admiral s dinner before which Stephen and Jack meet Captain Miller , Leyton s nephew and Jack s neighbour at Caxley . Miller , who has a reputation as a ladies man and as an excellent shot nicknamed Hair Trigger Miller has been paying court to Christine Wood . The Admiral asks Aubrey if he can take Miller on board with him to take up a new position in Cape Town . In the last few handwritten pages that follow the end of the typescript , as the South Africa squadron makes its way to St Helena , Mrs Wood asks Stephen to prevent Randolph Miller s unwanted attentions . In doing so , Stephen also calls Miller out for naming him a liar . Miller insists on pistols but Maturin insists on his right , as the aggrieved party , to name the weapons thus they fight with swords , which puts Miller at a disadvantage . The duel takes place after three or four thrusts Stephen disarms Miller and demands an apology , which Miller gives him .

<|fantasy|>The novel s protagonist , the crap artist of the title , is Jack Isidore , a socially awkward tire regroover obsessed with amateur scientific inquiry since his teens . He catalogs old science magazines , collects worthless objects , and believes disproved theories , such as the notions that the Earth is hollow or that sunlight has weight . Broke , Jack eventually moves in with his sister s family in a luxurious farm house in suburban California . On the farm , Jack happily does housework and cares for livestock . He also joins a small apocalyptic religious group , which shares his belief in extra sensory perception , telepathy and UFOs and believes the world will end on April 23 , 1959 . However , most of his time is dedicated to a meticulous scientific journal of life on the farm , including his sister s marital difficulties . Jack s sister , Fay Hume , is a difficult and subtly controlling woman who makes miserable everyone close to her , especially her misogynist husband Charley . Fay has an extramarital affair with a young grad student named Nat Anteil while Charley is in a hospital recovering from a heart attack . After Jack reports this to Charley , the latter plots to kill Fay . Charley kills Fay s animals and then commits suicide , realising that Fay has led him to do this . However , his will stipulates that Jack will inherit half the house , and Fay must buy her brother out , although Jack has used his half of the money to replace the slaughtered animals . Nat and his wife Gwen divorce , and Nat decides to stay with Fay . When the end of the world doesn t occur on the predicted date , Jack decides to seek psychiatric assistance .

<|comedy|>Many have likened Join My Cult ! s non linear or cut up style to Thomas Pynchon , William Burroughs , and Robert Anton Wilson . Also like the works of these authors , there have been heated debates about its cultural value or lack thereof . Various plot elements focus on groups of suburban kids experimenting with shamanism and hallucinogens , who quickly discover themselves unhinged from the culture around them . It details events surrounding their harrowing plunge into this abyss , regularly shifting narrator and frame of reference from one member of the group to the other . Curcio utilizes atypical narrative and grammatical structures in the form of neurolinguistic and hypnotic confusion techniques within the text in an effort to stimulate a similar experience over the course of reading . That Curcio was intentionally utilizing these techniques is shown in various interviews such as a Gpod radio interview found on his website .

<|childrens|>The novel begins with an unnamed narrator s arrival in Medicine Bow , Wyoming , from back East and his encounter with an impressively tall and handsome stranger who proves adept at roping horses , teasing a friend who is off to be married , and facing down a fellow gambler , Trampas , with a pistol and a gently threatening , When you call me that , smile ! This stranger , known only as the Virginian , turns out to be the narrator s guide to Judge Henry s ranch in Sunk Creek , Wyoming . As the two travel the 283 miles to the ranch , the narrator , later nicknamed the tenderfoot and the Virginian begin to come to know one another as the Tenderfoot slowly begins to understand the nature of life in the West , which is very different from what he expected . This meeting is the beginning of what becomes a deep lifelong friendship and the starting point of the narrator s recounting of key episodes in the life of the Virginian . From that point onward , the novel revolves around the Virginian and the life he lives . As well as describing the Virginian s conflict with his enemy , Trampas , and his romance with the pretty schoolteacher , Molly Stark Wood , Wister weaves a tale of action , violence , hate , revenge , love and friendship . In one scene , the Virginian must participate in the hanging of an admitted cattle thief , who had been his close friend . The hanging is represented as a necessary response to the government s corruption and lack of action , but the Virginian feels it to be a horrible duty . He is especially stricken by the bravery with which the thief faces his fate , and the heavy burden that the act places on his heart forms the emotional core of the story . A fatal shootout resolves the ongoing conflict with Trampas , after five years of hate . The Virginian shoots Trampas in a gun battle and leaves to marry his young bride . The Virginian and Molly ride off together to spend a month in the mountains and then journey back East to Maine to meet her family . They were received a bit stiffly by the immediate Wood family , but warmly by Molly s great aunt . The new couple return to Wyoming and the Virginian is made a partner of Judge Henry s ranch . The book ends noting that the Virginian became an important man in the territory with a happy family .

<|novel|>The novel begins with the introduction of Lee , who recounts his life in Mexico City among an American expatriate college students and bar owners surviving on part time jobs and GI Bill benefits . The novel is written in the third person and Burroughs commented in the Introduction published in 1985 , that it represents him off heroin , whereas in Junkie , his narrator was psychologically protected by his addiction . Lee is self conscious , insecure , and driven to pursue a young man named Allerton , who is based on Adelbert Lewis Marker 1930 1998 , a recently discharged American Navy serviceman from Jacksonville , Florida who befriended Burroughs in Mexico City .

<|fantasy|>The novel begins with an inflated and parodic but reasonably accurate portrayal of Ellis early fame . It details incidents of his wild drug use and his publicly humiliating book tours to promote Glamorama . The novel dissolves into fiction as Ellis describes a liaison with an actress named Jayne Dennis , whom he later marries , and with whom he conceives an initially illegitimate child . From this point the fictional Ellis life reflects the real Ellis only in some descriptions of the past and possibly in his general sentiments . Ellis and Jayne move to fictional Midland , an affluent suburban town outside New York City , which they no longer consider safe due to pervasive terrorist acts in a post 9 11 America . Fictional incidents include suicide bombings in Wal Marts and a dirty bomb detonated in Florida . Strange incidents start happening on a Halloween night , some involving Sarah s Ellis fictional stepdaughter Terby doll . As the novel progresses , the haunting of Ellis McMansion and questions over the death of his father become increasingly prominent . With his history of drug use and alcoholism , his wife , children , and housekeeper are understandably skeptical of his claims that the house is haunted .

<|fantasy|>The plot focuses on Adam Salton , originally from Australia , who is contacted by his great uncle , Richard Salton , in 1860 Derbyshire for the purpose of establishing a relationship between these last two members of the family . His great uncle wants to make Adam his heir . Adam travels to Richard Salton s house in Mercia , Lesser Hill , and quickly finds himself at the centre of mysterious and inexplicable occurrences . The new heir to the Caswall estate , known as Castra Regis , the Royal Camp , Edgar Caswall , appears to be making some sort of a mesmeric assault on a local girl , Lilla Watford , while a local lady , Arabella March , seems to be running a game of her own , perhaps angling to become Mrs . Caswall . Adam Salton discovers black snakes on the property and buys a mongoose to hunt them down . He then discovers a child who has been bitten on the neck . The child barely survives . He learns that another child was killed earlier while animals were also killed in the region . The mongoose attacks Arabella who shoots it to death . Arabella tears another mongoose apart with her hands . Arabella then murders Oolanga , the African servant , by dragging him down into a pit or hole . Adam witnesses the murder which he cannot prove . Adam then suspects Arabella of the other crimes . Adam and Sir Nathaniel de Salis , who is a friend of Richard Salton s , then plot to stop Arabella by whatever means necessary . They suspect that she wants to murder Mimi Watford , whom Adam later marries . Nathaniel is an Abraham Van Helsing type of character who wants to hunt down Arabella . The White Worm is a large snake like creature that dwells in the hole or pit in Arabella s house located in Diana s Grove . The White Worm has green glowing eyes and feeds on whatever is thrown to it in the pit . The White Worm ascends from the pit and seeks to attack Adam and Mimi Watford in a forest . Adam plans to pour sand into the pit and to use dynamite to kill the giant White Worm while it is inside the pit . Edgar Caswall is a slightly pathological eccentric who has Mesmer s chest which he keeps at the Castra Regis Tower . Caswall wants to recreate mesmerism , associated with Anton Mesmer , which was a precursor to hypnotism . He has a giant kite in the shape of a hawk to scare away pigeons which have gone berserk and have attacked his fields . In the final scene , Adam Salton , Mimi Watford , and Nathaniel de Salis confront Arabella and Edgar Caswall . A thunderstorm and lightning destroy Diana s Grove by igniting the dynamite .

<|fantasy|>Both the short story and the novel open in a post apocalyptic Southern California , in a hellish world shattered by nuclear war decades before . Several police states have emerged in place of the former United States . Hurricane force winds above five hundred feet prevent any sort of air travel from one state to the next , and sudden , violent , and unpredictable storms make day to day life a mini hell . Hell Tanner , an imprisoned killer , is offered a full pardon in exchange for taking on a suicide mission mdash a drive through Damnation Alley across a ruined America from Los Angeles to Boston mdash as one of three vehicles attempting to deliver an urgently needed plague vaccine .

<|fantasy|>Willis Davidge , a human fighter pilot , is stranded along with Jeriba Shigan , a Drac , on a hostile planet . The Drac are a race of aliens which are reptilian in appearance and reproduce asexually . Davidge and Jeriba Shigan , whom Davidge nicknames Jerry , initially attempt to kill one another but quickly realize that cooperation will be the key to their survival .

<|fantasy|>In the opening section of the book , the year is 1958 and Ruth Cole is four years old . Although she is a loved child , her parents do not have a happy marriage . Her two older brothers died four years earlier in a car accident , and she is constantly reminded of their presence from the pictures of their childhood hanging on the walls of the Cole family home . Ruth s father , Ted Cole , writes successful children s books , and hires Eddie O Hare , a teenager who attends Phillips Exeter Academy , the same school as Ruth s two late brothers , to work as his assistant for the summer . Eddie is unwittingly drawn into a plot orchestrated by Ted to drive his unhappy wife , Marion , to infidelity . Marion , unable to forget her dead sons , shows little affection to her daughter . Ted has always conducted extramarital affairs and would likely lose in a custody battle for Ruth in divorce court . If Marion had an affair , he feels that this would strengthen the case for custody to be awarded to him . Ted picks Eddie specifically to tempt Marion , since he bears a striking resemblance to his two dead sons . Eddie and Marion s affair leads to Marion s disappearance at the end of the summer . It is 1990 and Ruth is thirty six . She is in Europe , dealing with the failures of her love life as she herself has become a successful writer . Ruth is doing research on prostitutes in Amsterdam s red light district , and finds herself hiding in a closet while she observes the murder of a prostitute by the prostitute s client . She makes note of certain details of the murder which , in the future , lead to the murderer s arrest . The detective who solves the murder case is left with the identity of the mysterious witness unknown . Ruth is now forty one , has a son , and is about to fall in love for the first time . This section covers Ruth s brief widowhood A Widow for One Year is a literal description of Ruth s situation as well as a quote from one of her novels . The detective who solved the murder case that Ruth witnessed four years before realizes that Ruth is the witness , because Ruth included details of the victim s room in her novel , and the detective is a fan of Ruth s work . Ruth discovers that the murder was solved and the murderer caught . Ruth meets with the detective , and they fall in love . After a whirlwind romance in Paris the next stop on Ruth s book tour he agrees to follow Ruth to Vermont , where they marry . Eddie O Hare and Ruth , unexpectedly , re unite with Marion . They end up living happily in Vermont .

<|childrens|>The Canterville Ghost is a study in contrasts . Wilde takes an American family , places them in a British setting , then , through a series of mishaps , pits one culture against the other . He creates stereotypical characters that represent both England and the United States , and he presents each of these characters as comical figures , satirizing both the unrefined tastes of Americans and the determination of the British to guard their traditions . Sir Simon is not a symbol of England , as perhaps Mrs . Umney is , but rather a paragon of British culture . In this sense , he stands in perfect contrast to the Otises . Sir Simon misunderstands the Otises just as they misunderstand him , and , by pitting them against each other , Wilde clearly wishes to emphasize the culture clash between England and the United States . The story illustrates Wilde s tendency to reverse situations into their opposites as the Otises gain the upper hand and succeed in terrorizing the ghost rather than be terrorized by him . Wilde pairs this reversal of situations with a reversal of perspective . This ghost story is told not from the perspective of the castle occupants , as in traditional tales , but from the perspective of the ghost , Sir Simon . In this sense , Sir Simon could logically be labeled the protagonist in this story , as it is he who faces the challenge of overcoming adversity and bettering his life . Though Wilde tells a humorous tale , it appears that he also has a message , and he uses fifteen year old Virginia to convey it . Virginia says that the ghost helped her see the significance of life and death , and why love is stronger than both . This is certainly not the first time an author has used the traditional ghost story and the theme of life and death to examine the issue of forgiveness ghosts , after all , presumably remain in this realm because , for some reason , they are unable to move on . Wilde s ghost , Sir Simon , had been very wicked , Virginia tells her father after she returns to the castle . But he was really sorry for all that he had done . God has forgiven him , Virginia tells her father , and because of that forgiveness , in the end , Sir Simon de Canterville can rest in peace .

<|fantasy|>Martin Gibson , a famous science fiction author , is travelling to Mars , as a guest of the crew of the spaceship Ares . After arriving at Space Station One , in the orbit of Earth , from which all interplanetary journeys start , he makes the trip to Mars . The youngest crew member , Jimmy Spencer , who is still in training to be an astronaut , is assigned the task of answering his questions about the technology of space flight , and they become friends . Gibson tells him about his early life , revealing that he had to leave Cambridge University because of a nervous breakdown and never completed his studies . After psychiatric treatment , he had become an author . He also reveals that he had an affair at university but that he and his girlfriend broke up and that she married another man , had a child and later died . On Mars , Gibson and the crew go their separate ways . Gibson meets the Chief Executive of Mars , Warren Hadfield , and Mayor Whittaker , who run the colony from the base at Port Lowell . He discusses the future of the colony with Hadfield , who is keen to make Mars as self sufficient as possible , given the vast distance that materials have to come from Earth . On a trip by passenger jet to an outlying research station , Gibson and the crew are forced down by a dust storm . They explore the nearby area and discover a small group of kangaroo like creatures , the unsuspected natives of Mars . They appear to have limited intelligence by human standards and are vegetarians , living on native plants . It is later revealed that the plants are being cultivated by researchers to enrich the oxygen content of the Martian atmosphere . This project , and related others , are being kept secret from Earth . Gibson discovers that Spencer is his son . In the meantime , Spencer has formed an attachment to Irene , Hadfield s daughter . Hadfield reveals that scientists have been working on Project Dawn , which involves the ignition of the moon Phobos and its use as a second sun for Mars . It will burn for at least one thousand years and the extra heat , together with mass production of the oxygen generating plants , will eventually it is hoped make the Martian atmosphere breathable for humans . Gibson finds himself so persuaded of the importance of Mars as a self sufficient world that he applies to stay on the planet , and is invited to take charge of public relations in effect , to sell Mars to potential colonists .

<|novel|>Twenty year old Kenji is a Japanese nightlife guide for foreigners he navigates gaijin men around the sex clubs and hostess bars of Tokyo . On December 29 he receives a phone call from an American named Frank , who seeks three nights of his services . While Kenji has promised to spend more time with his girlfriend , sixteen year old Jun , the money is too good to pass up . He finds himself closing out the end of the year accompanying Frank around Shinjuku , wondering if his strange , plastic skinned patron could be responsible for the gruesome events recently reported in the news .

<|novel|>Thirty two year old narrator Kensuke Yazaki takes a nostalgic look at the year 1969 when he , as an ambitious and aspiring seventeen year old , living in Sasebo , in western Kyushu where he gets into antics with his equally ambitious and enthusiastic best friends , Iwase and Adama . Their priorities are girls , cinema , music , literature , pop culture , organising a school festival The Morning Erection Festival , bettering teachers and enemies , and finding a way to change the world somehow .

<|novel|>The novel takes place during the Vietnam War and tells of two sisters aged 15 and 14 , who have been arrested , tortured and finally put into Poulo Condor prison . Throughout their sad adventure , the young girls recall important events in which they were involved , such as the Tet offensive . However , their recollections center more on the countryside , the colors and the scents and smells of their childhood . fr Riz noir roman

<|crime|>This novel puts Marlowe in the position of turning against his client . We are at the beginning of 1952 some 18 months after the parting of Marlowe and Linda Loring in The Long Goodbye . An unknown client hires Marlowe via intermediaries to follow a woman traveling under the name Eleanor King whose real name is Betty Mayfield . Marlowe traces Mayfield to the small coastal resort town of Esmeralda in California , where he is given the runaround by practically everyone . During her train ride west , Mayfield was recognized by a man who then seeks to blackmail her , for reasons disclosed at the end of the novel . While Marlowe is poking around Esmeralda , the blackmailer is found dead on Mayfield s hotel room balcony . She panics and calls Marlowe for help . Marlowe encounters a variety of characters with dubious motivations , including a taciturn lawyer and his smart secretary with whom Marlowe had a sexual encounter , a retired gangster , overconfident would be tough guys of varying morals , a hired killer whose wrists Marlowe smashes , decent police officers , an affectingly desperate example of the American immigrant underclass of the 1950s . Marlowe also had a striking encounter in a hotel lobby with a reflective elderly gentleman , Henry Clarendon IV , which gives rise to an extended philosophical conversation . Marlowe learns that Betty Mayfield had been married to the son of Henry Cumberland , a big shot in a small North Carolina town . The son , Lee Cumberland , had suffered a broken neck during the Second World War and , though mobile and not paralyzed , for safety he regularly wore a neck brace . One day there was a quarrel between them , and later , the husband was found dead , with Mayfield re fixing the neck brace on his body . The case drew widespread newspaper publicity which is why the blackmailer recognized Mayfield on the train , and due to Cumberland s influence on the jury , the jury found Mayfield guilty of murder . But the jury s verdict was set aside by the judge , who saw more than a reasonable doubt and rejected the jury verdict as tainted . Cumberland vowed to hound Mayfield wherever she went , which is why she fled to Esmeralda Cumberland was presumably behind Marlowe being hired in the first place . Cumberland arrives in Esmeralda to hound Mayfield in person , but with the help of the local police captain , Marlowe scares off Cumberland . In the British edition of the novel , and the screenplay version by Chandler , see below , Cumberland s name is Kinsolving . Mayfield decides to marry a local criminal turned respectable , who has taken a romantic interest in her . Marlowe lets her go ahead but has a frank talk with the ex criminal , who obviously hasn t quite mended his ways , as he was behind the killing of the blackmailer . At the book s conclusion , Marlowe is rewarded by providence when an old flame Linda Loring from the previous novel , The Long Goodbye , gets back in touch .

<|fantasy|>The book is the story of Felix Rayman , a down and out mathematics teacher at SUCAS a state college in New York with a troubled family life and dead in the water career . He begins experimenting with lucid dreaming aided by fuzz weed marijuana hoping to gain insight into Cantor s continuum hypothesis . During an out of body experience , Felix loses his physical body and nearly falls victim to the Devil , who hunts the Earth for souls like his to take to Hell Felix calls upon Jesus , who saves him . Jesus asks Felix to do him a favor to take a restless ghost named Kathy to a place called Cimön , and bring her to God Absolute Infinite , which can be found there . Cimön is permeated with the notion of infinity in its various guises just getting there involves grappling with infinity , as Cimön is an infinite distance away from Earth . Felix and Kathy get there in their astral bodies by doubling their speed in half the time so that they asymptotically approach infinite speed at four hours . Eventually , at the speed of light , they turn into the eponymous white light and merge with Cimön . In this new world , Felix encounters famous scientists and mathematicians such as Albert Einstein and Georg Cantor , who all reside in a hotel that is based on Hilbert s paradox of the Grand Hotel . Felix stays there after Kathy leaves him the hotel is full , but Felix has the desk clerk move everybody one room up , leaving an empty room for him . He falls in with a loquacious beetle named Franx , reminiscent of Franz Kafka s The Metamorphosis , which is mentioned in Rucker s Afterword . The two decide to climb Mount On , which itself is infinite not aleph null infinite , but perhaps instead cardinality of the continuum or greater . After many adventures , Franx and Felix find Kathy . They leave off climbing Mount On , and instead try the other side of Cimön , the Deserts , littered with portholes to Hell . Felix merges with the Absolute Infinite , but Kathy is scared and refuses . Eventually , Felix wakes back up on Earth in his body everybody attributes his dreams to a spectacular binge drinking and marijuana smoking episode , until Felix remembers an insight he had regarding the continuum hypothesis if there were three basic kinds of existence , that of solid matter , aether , and things he calls bloogs which are not aleph null or c infinitely divisible , but a higher infinity , then the hypothesis will have been disproven . With the aid of a physicist friend , he uses his astral travelling abilities to create a ball of this bloog matter . The ball has unusual properties such as ignoring gravity or being indivisible , or to be more precise , being a physical instantiation of the Banach Tarski paradox , which means it can be broken apart into multiple pieces , each of which is exactly like the original . It is implied the US government suppresses their research .

<|mystery|>The Lake House starts some time after When the Wind Blows . The bird children Max , Matthew , Ozymandias , Wendy , Peter , and Icarus are all depressed and unhappy in their new normal lives and wish to return to live with Frannie and Kit . Frannie and Kit miss the children as well and engage in a courtroom battle to regain custody of the children . The judge decides that the children will remain living with their biological parents until an appeal hearing is made . Meanwhile , a doctor named Ethan Kane begins trying to capture the bird children and bring them to the place he works , a nightmarish place called the Hospital . In the Hospital , faceless people are murdered and dissected and their organs are taken and used for the Resurrection of rich and famous people such as former presidents and prime ministers . Going back to their lives , the children are forced to put up with harassment from various reporters and paparazzi . After a visit from one of the reporters , it is revealed that Max knows about the Hospital from working at the School , but was trained not to talk about it on the threat of death . Upset , she goes to Oz for comfort . He tells her that she is drop dead gorgeous . Shortly after , the two begin a sexual relationship . After Kane attempts to kidnap Max and Matthew on their way home , the siblings escape and meet up with the rest of the flock . The children then fly to Frannie s house for protection . That night , Hospital workers try to break into Frannie s house . She calls the police and sets her house on fire . She and the children then escape through the basement and meet up with Kit . Kit takes them to Washington D . C . for help . While left alone , hit men hired by Kane capture the children . Oz is killed while trying to protect Max . Frannie and Kit try to rescue the children but are drugged and hooked up to holographic monitors , which give the patients pleasant visions while their organs are being taken . Max and the flock manage to escape and Frannie and Kit are released later . Although they try to expose the Hospital , all evidence of their experiments are hidden and the V . I . Ps seen there have alibis . At the appeal hearing , the judge decides to return the children to the custody of Frannie and Kit . The family rejoices and moves back to the Lake House . There , Frannie notices that Max has been in her room all morning . She goes to investigate and learns that Max has laid two eggs her babies with Oz . Max spends the next few weeks caring for the eggs . One night , Kane breaks into Max s room to steal the eggs . Max fights him off and knocks him out of the window , fulfilling her promise to Oz that she d break his neck . Four weeks later , the eggs hatch . Max s winged babies are a boy and a girl , who she names Ozymandias and Frances Jane . The book ends with Max thinking that she can t wait to teach them how to fly .

<|fantasy|>Alvin and Arthur stay at a boarding house where mixed blood children are cared for by Papa Moose and Momma Squirrel . While there , Alvin uses his knack to cleanse the mosquitoes and disease from a well . A young woman , whom the people call Dead Mary , sees what he has done and asks him to come with her and heal her mother , who has yellow fever . Because Alvin heals her , the Yellow Fever spreads throughout Nueva Barcelona , averting an impending war with the United States over slavery . As the fever spreads , people begin to suspect Papa Moose and Momma Squirrel because Alvin has been healing everyone he can , radiating outward through the city . Alvin is then approached by La Tia , an African woman , who wants him to help all the slaves and the displaced French to escape Nueva Barcelona . He reluctantly agrees . Alvin s brother , Calvin , at the behest of Alvin s wife , Margaret , comes to help . Calvin raises a thick fog while Alvin uses his blood magic he learned from the Red Prophet Tenskwa Tawa to construct a crystal bridge across lake Ponchartrain to the north . Arthur helps Alvin with the bridge . While the escapees flee north , they take food and provision from plantations along the way and free any slaves they find . Alvin goes to Tenskwa Tawa on the other side of the Mizzippy to ask for safe passage through the Red Man s lands , so they can escape the pursuing army . Alvin and Tenskwa Tawa put on a show by holding back the Mizzippy river to allow the exodus of people from Nueva Barcelona to cross , while the pursuing army can do nothing but watch . Calvin leaves with Jim Bowie and Steve Austin to conquer the Mexica . Verily Cooper is sent by Margaret to seek out Abe Lincoln and get his help for figuring out what to do with all the runaways when they reach the Noisy River Territory . Alvin discovers that Tenskwa Tawa has been collaborating with La Tia to create a volcanic eruption under the Mexica , who are becoming increasingly threatening . Alvin sends Arthur to initiate the eruption and warn his brother Calvin , who ignores the warning but still manages to escape . Bowie and several others leave with Arthur . The people travel through the Indian lands using the greensong , which allows them to move more quickly . When they reach the Noisy River territory , Abe Lincoln and Verily Cooper have decided to create a new county so they can appoint their own judges that will resist the law to return slaves to their masters . There Alvin starts to build the crystal city he saw in a vision . He realizes that not everyone has to have maker skills , but can contribute in their own way felling trees , digging the foundation , etc . But all is not well . Calvin and Bowie arrive and decide to stay .

<|fantasy|>In Borges story , the Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points . Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously , without distortion , overlapping or confusion . The story continues the theme of infinity found in several of Borges other works , such as The Book of Sand . As in many of Borges short stories , the protagonist is a fictionalized version of the author . At the beginning of the story , he is mourning the recent death of a woman whom he loved , named Beatriz Viterbo , and resolves to stop by the house of her family to pay his respects . Over time , he comes to know her first cousin , Carlos Argentino Daneri , a mediocre poet with a vastly exaggerated view of his own talent who has made it his lifelong quest to write an epic poem that describes every single location on the planet in excruciatingly fine detail . Later in the story , a business on the same street attempts to tear down Daneri s house in the course of its expansion . Daneri becomes enraged , explaining to the narrator that he must keep the house in order to finish his poem , because the cellar contains an Aleph which he is using to write it . Though by now he believes Daneri to be quite insane , the narrator proposes without waiting for an answer to come to the house and see the Aleph for himself . Left alone in the darkness of the cellar , the narrator begins to fear that Daneri is conspiring to kill him , and then he sees the Aleph for himself . Though staggered by the experience of seeing the Aleph , the narrator pretends to have seen nothing in order to get revenge on Daneri , whom he hates , by giving him reason to doubt his own sanity . In a postscript to the story , Borges explains that Daneri s house was ultimately demolished , but that Daneri himself won second place in the Argentine National Prize for Literature . He also states his belief that the Aleph in Daneri s house was not the only one that exists , based on a report he has discovered , written by Captain Burton when he was British consul in Brazil , describing the Amr mosque in Cairo , within which there is said to be a stone pillar that contains the entire universe although this Aleph cannot be seen , it is said that those who put their ear to the pillar can hear it .

<|novel|>The story takes place in an unnamed school classroom , in the aftermath of a war with an unnamed country . It is implied that a country similar to America has been defeated and occupied . The story opens with the previous teacher leaving the classroom , having been removed from her position and replaced with an agent of the foreign power . The new teacher has been trained in propaganda techniques , and is responsible for re educating the children to be supportive of their occupiers . During the course of the story , the children are persuaded to abandon their religion and national loyalty . Framing the story is the fact that , while the children have ritually recited a Pledge of Allegiance every morning , none know what it actually means . The teacher is relentlessly positive about the change , offering the children candy , songs and praise . When asked if the war was won or lost , she responds only that we won , implying that everyone would benefit from the conquest . Only one student is initially hostile to the new teacher , a child named Johnny , whose father had been arrested and placed in a re education camp . At first , he defends his father , but when he is rewarded by the teacher with a position of authority in the class , he quickly accepts the new regime and commits himself to not accepting wrong thoughts . The story takes place over a twenty five minute span .

<|childrens|>Meg Finn is in trouble . Her mother is dead and her only family is an abusive stepfather who does nothing but watch TV all day . Her stepfather is forced to resign from his job when Meg embarrassed him by showing his work colleagues a video of herself smashing his brand new television that he bought with Meg s mother s engagement ring and all of Meg s life saving . When she is forced to help Belch Brennan , a dim witted criminal , rob the elderly Lowrie McCall , the attempted burglary ends in disaster . In an attempt to scare Meg , Belch shoots by a gas tank which explodes , killing them both . While Belch is sent straight to hell his soul merged with that of his vicious dog Raptor by the explosion , making him a half boy half dog creature , Meg s perfect balance between good and evil earns her a chance to redeem herself and get blue in her Aura . She is sent back to earth in order to help Lowrie complete the items on his wish list a list of things that he feels will correct the many mistakes he made in his life . Meanwhile , Satan has decided that he wants Meg s soul in Hell and Beelzebub is forced to send Belch to recapture Meg and make her bad , making Belch and Elph , the hologram with which he has been equipped , the chief antagonists in the story . The Wish List 1 Kissy Sissy Kiss Cicely Ward , aka Sissy a popular talk show granny and one date girlfriend of Lowrie . 2 Kick a ball over the bar in Croke Park . 3 Burst Ball Punch a man who bullied Lowrie at school , Punch Brendan Ball . 4 Spit over the Cliffs of Moher . Ultimately , following a confrontation on the edge of the Cliffs of Moher , Belch is destroyed and Meg s final act of holiness giving her stepfather a new life gains her entry to Heaven , where she meets her mother again .

<|childrens|>In the first novel in the series , we are introduced to four high school students , Lena Kaligaris , Tibby Rollins , Bridget Vreeland , and Carmen Lowell , who have been best friends since birth their mothers attended prenatal exercise classes together . The summer before their junior year of high school , Carmen finds a pair of old jeans that fits each of them perfectly despite their different sizes , convincing the girls that the pants are magical . They share the traveling pants among themselves over the summer while they are separated . Lena spends the summer with her grandparents in Santorini , Greece . While there , she meets Kostos , the grandson of some of Lena s grandparents friends , and he becomes interested in Lena . Though she does reciprocate his feelings , she is shy and is unable to express them . Lena goes skinny dipping and is accidentally seen by Kostos , and her grandparents assume she has been assaulted by him when she is unable to explain what happened . Later in the summer , Lena explains what happened in order to repair the rift between her and Kostos grandparents , and confesses to Kostos that she loves him . Tibby spends the summer working at a department store , planning to make a documentary of her experiences there . She meets a 12 year old girl named Bailey , whom she is initially annoyed with , but becomes close with by the end of summer as they work on Tibby s documentary . Bailey is hospitalized and dies at the end of the novel from leukemia , which results in Tibby refocusing her documentary to be about the summer they spent together . Carmen goes to South Carolina to spend the summer with her father , whom she has grown apart from since he and Carmen s mother divorced several years before . Carmen is surprised to learn that her father is engaged and lives with a woman with two grown children of her own . After being frustrated at feeling left out of her father s new family , she breaks a window in their house and returns home to her mother . She eventually reconciles with her father and attends his wedding at the urging of her friends . Bridget attends a soccer camp in Baja California , Mexico . While there , she meets Eric , one of the coaches , and immediately falls for him . Despite coach camper relationships being completely off limits , Bridget actively pursues him anyway by running with him and going to his room in her underwear . She eventually manages to seduce him and loses her virginity to him , which turns out to be too much for her to handle and after walking off the field during the championship , she takes to her bed for days . Eric later visits her and asks her to take a walk with him , where he tells her that if they had met under different circumstances , he would worship her the way she deserved to be worshiped . Lena comes to comfort her and takes her home .

<|novel|>The novel is composed of many jokes , which have strong effects on the characters . The story is told from the four viewpoints of Ludvik Jahn , Helena Zemánková , Kostka , and Jaroslav . Jaroslav s joke is the transition away from his coveted Moravian folk lifestyle and appreciation . Kostka , who has separated himself from the Communist Party due to his Christianity , serves as a counterpoint to Ludvik . Helena serves as Ludvik s victim and is satirical of the seriousness of party supporters . Ludvik demonstrates the shortcomings of the party and propels the plot in his search for revenge and redemption . Written in 1965 Prague and first published in Czechoslovakia in 1967 , the novel opens with Ludvik Jahn looking back on the joke that changed his life in the early 1950s . Ludvik was a dashing , witty , and popular student who supported the Party . Like most of his friends , he was an enthusiastic supporter of the still fresh Communist regime in post World War II Czechoslovakia . In a playful mood , he writes a postcard to a girl in his class during their summer break . Since Ludvik believes she is too serious , he writes on the postcard , Optimism is the opium of the people ! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity ! Long live Trotsky ! His colleagues and fellow young party leaders did not see the humor in the sentiment expressed in the postcard . Ludvik finds himself expelled from the party and college and drafted to a part of the Czech military where alleged subversives form work brigades and spend the next few years working in mines . Despite the interruption in his career , Ludvik has become a successful scientist . However , his treatment at the hands of his former friends has left him bitter and angry . An opportunity arises when he meets Helena , who is married to Pavel Zemanek , the friend who led the efforts to purge Ludvik from the party . Ludvik decides to seduce Helena as a means of exacting his revenge . In essence this is the second joke of the novel . Although the seduction is successful , things do not quite play out the way Ludvik expects this is the novel s third joke , and he is left once more to sit and think bitter thoughts . Ultimately he decides that these sorts of jokes and their repercussions are not the fault of the humans who set them in motion , but are really just a matter of historic inevitability . Ultimately , then , one cannot blame forces that cannot be changed or altered .

<|horror|>The main character of Bitten is Elena Michaels , an ordinary woman who also happens to be a werewolf . She lives in Toronto , Canada and writes for a popular newspaper . Elena is also the only known female werewolf in the world . This gives her a very special place in the werewolf world , and especially with the werewolf pack . She struggles to deal with her other ness and to assimilate to the human world . She also contends with her terrible childhood , and with the man who bit her and turned her into a werewolf . Elena has managed to settle into a somewhat normal existence , living with her ad exec boyfriend and ignoring her wolf side as much as possible . However , she learns that her Pack the governing body of werewolves is in trouble , and comes to their aid , flying to Stonehaven , the country estate of the pack Alpha . It is in Bear Valley , a fictional city in up state New York . When Elena arrives , she is greeted by her ex lover , Clayton Danvers , who is also the man who bit her and made her a werewolf without her consent . Clayton is also the bodyguard and foster son to Jeremy Danvers , the pack Alpha leader . Elena learns that a local woman was found murdered on Stonehaven s land , and that she had been savaged by what authorities thought to be a dog . However , the Pack has determined that she was murdered by a Mutt , a rogue werewolf . They track the mutt and find out he is a recently escaped killer , who has even more recently been turned by a bite into a werewolf . Clay and Elena chase him into a rave and after several of the partyers are killed , the police shoot him in wolf form . Soon , the rest of the Pack arrives on the scene to help with the problem Antonio Sorrentino , his son Nicholas Sorrentino , Logan Jonsen , and Peter Myers . The werewolf Pack are the self appointed governing body of the werewolf world , and they kill to keep the existence of werewolves a secret . This means if they feel any non Pack wolves whom they term Mutts become noticeable to humans , they kill them . They kill humans too , but not as often . First , Logan and Peter are killed . This greatly saddens Elena , and she starts sleeping cheating with Clay again , without telling her boyfriend , Phillip . As Logan and Peter are not the best fighters , the Pack wonders why that would happen . They also wonder why any Mutt would dare to go near the Pack . Most are terrified of being noticed by them . Then Jeremy , the Alpha is attacked . Finally , the pack figures out that the mutts , tired of being brutalized by the Pack , are trying to free themselves from their rule . To do this one mutt in particular , Daniel , who has reason to hate Clay from childhood , has started turning human killers and other escaped convicts into werewolves to fight the pack .

<|childrens|>In Chicken Trek , Oscar Noodleman goes to Secaucus , New Jersey to visit his cousin Dr . Prechtwinkle , an inventor . Before this , however , he had dropped Dr . Prechtwinkle s valuable camera , and now has to work for him to repay the debt . Dr . Prechtwinkle tells Oscar about a contest where the goal is to eat a Bagful o Chicken at all 211 Chicken in a Bag restaurants nationwide . The prize from this contest would pay Oscar s debt , so they attempt to win it . Chicken Trek has drawings by Ron Barrett , illustrator of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs . 1st edition New York Dutton , c1987 , ISBN 0 525 44312 6

<|fantasy|>The novel begins with the character of Tasslehoff Burrfoot at the Inn of the Last Home with his friends . However , soon a bounty hunter arrives and charges him for desertion for violating the laws of prearranged marriage . A journey east turns into a voyage with gully dwarves . Meanwhile in Kendermore , Tas s Uncle Trapspringer and a human doctor have found a map leading to a treasure . Tas is having his own adventures after a shipwreck strands him , Gisella the bounty hunter , and Woodrow Gisella s assistant near a dwarven settlement . Tas is captured by gnomes , who seek to turn him into an exhibit . Woodrow saves him with help from Winnie , a wooly mammoth . Gisella is killed by Denzil , an assassin . Tas and Woodrow arrive in Kendermore . In the ruins east of the city , Dr . Phineas Curick , Uncle Trapspringer , and Damaris the one intended to marry Tasslehoff find themselves being entertained by Vincent , a rare ogre who is good ! The kender and human wander into a magical portal which takes them to Gelfigburg , a Candyland like place . They also discover that the treasure a magical amulet has been used up . Denzil , not knowing this , forces Tas to take him to the ruins . Tas tries to go into the portal , but Denzil pulls him out before he is all the way through , leaving Tas stuck in the portal . The kender in Gelfigburg attempt to pull Tas through , leading to a tug of war . Vincent pulls Tas , Damaris , Trapspringer , Phineas , and all the Kender out of Gelfigburg . Denzil is trapped inside . The Dark Queen attempts to enter , but Damaris closes the portal . The kender return to Kendermore , saving the city from a storm . Tas is reunified with Woodrow , and Damaris marries Trapspringer .

<|novel|>The novel features the romantic figure of Mihály , aloof and poetic , but struggling to break with an adolescent rebelliousness which he tries to quell under respectable bourgeois conformism , but also with the disturbing attraction of an erotic death wish . While there is no doubt an element of the then especially influential and risqué Freudianism in this , as well as perhaps the sexual and emotional claustrophobia of a society with strong Catholic and martial traditions , it also has a distinct originality . The novel follows Mihály , a Budapest native from a bourgeois family on his honeymoon in Italy , as he encounters and attempts to make sense of his past .

<|novel|>While attending a conference in Moscow , an historian named Christopher Fluke Kelso is met by an old man named Papu Rapava , who claims to have been present at the death of Joseph Stalin . Immediately after Stalin s death , Lavrenty Beria supposedly took measures to secure a black notebook , believed to be Stalin s secret diary . Rapava spent years in Kolyma after the authorities tried to extract the book s location from him , but he never revealed it and still has not , though he knows that shadowy agents are still watching him in case he should go near the mysterious thing . Kelso eventually locates the notebook , which Rapava had left to his daughter just before being recaptured and tortured to death . It proves to be the memoirs of a young girl chosen by Stalin to be the mother of his secret heir . Following the trail to the remote northern city of Arkhangelsk , Kelso comes face to face with Stalin s son . Raised in a log cabin filled with Stalin s personal effects , writings and recorded speeches , the son is a physical and ideological copy of his father we learn that he had murdered the husband and wife KGB agents who had raised him from infancy when he decided they were untrustworthy . Young Stalin has been told that he would be sent for when it was time for him to assume control of his country , and he believes that Kelso is the promised messenger . Stalin overcomes a special forces unit sent to eliminate him alarming Kelso by his ruthless and dispassionate use of violence and boards a train headed for Moscow . At each station , ever larger crowds gather to witness the apparent resurrection of the famous dictator , and it appears that he might be able to simply stride through the doors of the Kremlin and assume command . As he steps off the train in Moscow , Rapava s daughter , who has made her way into the crowd at the train station , takes out her father s pistol . The novel ends there .

<|fantasy|>The focus is on the struggles between the pioneers to establish a new social order now that they have left Basilica . The new society is opposite to that of the previous societies male dominated instead of female dominated , monogamous and lifelong marriages instead of the yearly contracts of Basilica . The struggles between the characters ultimately come down to the struggles between Nafai and Elemak , two sons of Volemak . Nafai leads the faction who have faith in the Oversoul , while Elemak leads the faction who want desperately to return to the civilization of doomed Basilica . Both are ostensibly under the leadership of Volemak and not Rasa , as they had been in the city . The settlers , after years of traveling , finally arrive in a land lost in ancient times which holds the secret of the Oversoul . Also many children are born , all in their preparation for the ultimate journey to Earth . The book offers an interesting justification of the social structures of the Hebrew tribes in Genesis , all while the originally powerful female characters gradually succumb to the new hierarchy of men and wives . Only one character Shedemei , the brilliant geneticist , thinks about this problem . The focus in on the group dynamics of the new tribe as they journey where the Oversoul guides them . Prophetic dreams abound , mostly involving giant rats and bats diggers and angels . The Oversoul discovers itself .

<|novel|>Set in the fictional town of Wellington , The Marrow of Tradition features several interweaving plots that encompass the poles of the racially segregated society of the American South at the turn of the century . One plot follows Major Carteret , the white owner of the major Wellington newspaper , as he colludes with several other powerful white men to take political control of the town . They are outraged about a provocative editorial published in a black paper that questioned white justifications for lynchings . As the town s unrest intensifies , Carteret faces domestic pressures his only child Dodie and wife Olivia are both unwell . Carteret s niece Clara , recently introduced to society , is courted by the young Tom Delamere , a handsome and conniving aristocrat who spends most evenings nurturing his penchant for drink and cards . His habits are contrasted with those of Lee Ellis , a rival for Clara , and William Miller , a young black physician who with his wife has returned to his hometown of Wellington to practice medicine . He gained his medical education in Paris and Vienna . Though jarred by segregation and Jim Crow racism , Miller sets up his practice and starts his life . Josh Green as a boy witnessed the murder of his father at the hands of a white man a character named Captain McBane and is intent on exacting revenge . All these subplots are forced to a crisis through two events the beginning of the riot and the murder of a white woman , Polly Ochiltree , for which a black servant , Sandy Campbell , is arrested . Tom Delamere is the real culprit . In this web of plotlines , Josh Green , whom Miller is unable to persuade to pursue racial equality along peaceable lines , ends up walking into the face of attackers to try to satisfy vengeance and kill McBane . Miller goes to the aid of Sandy Campbell to stave off a lynching . He is asked to give medical care to Carteret s baby boy , although the publisher had helped foment the riot . A stray bullet has killed Miller s infant son . The novel ends with Miller , setting aside his own losses , agreeing to go to Carteret s home to aid his dying son .

<|mystery|>Source documents compiled by insurance investigator Ralph Henderson are used to build a case against Baron R , who is suspected of murdering his wife . The baron s wife died from drinking a bottle of acid , apparently while sleepwalking in her husband s private laboratory . Henderson s suspicions are raised when he learns that the baron recently had purchased five life insurance policies for his wife . As Henderson investigates the case , he discovers not one but three murders . Although the baron s guilt is clear to the reader even from the outset , how he did it remains a mystery . Eventually this is revealed , but how to catch him becomes the final challenge he seems to have committed the perfect crime .

<|fantasy|>The Camp of the Saints is a novel about population migration and its consequences . In Calcutta , India , the Belgian government announces a policy in which Indian babies will be adopted and raised in Belgium . The policy is soon reversed after the Belgian consulate is inundated with poverty stricken parents eager to give up their infant children . An Indian wise man then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe . Most of the story centers on the French Riviera , where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians , including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run down freighters approaching the French coast . The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants . They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the plentiful goods that are in short supply in their native India . Although the novel focuses on France , the rest of the West shares its fate . Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem , the Queen of England must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman , and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia . The one holdout until the end of the novel is Switzerland , but by then international pressure isolating it as a rogue state for not opening its borders forces it to capitulate .

<|mystery|>One Thursday afternoon , Prof . Brade goes to visit his graduate student s laboratory . He finds Ralph Neufeld dead , having inhaled hydrogen cyanide . This is perhaps a grim echo of Ralph s connection with the Holocaust , as hydrogen cyanide was the lethal agent used by the Nazis in their gas chambers . In his experiment , he had somehow used sodium cyanide instead of sodium acetate , both white powders . Later , Brade is questioned by Detective Doheny , who is in charge of Ralph s case . When he gets home , he reveals to his wife his suspicions that Ralph s death was murder . She cautions him not to tell this to anyone , as he would destroy any chance of getting associate professorship and tenure . The next day , he meets with the emeritus Cap Anson , who seems to blame him for Ralph s death . They visit the zoo together , and Anson encourages Brade to go into comparative biochemistry . Brade refuses , saying he wants to continue Ralph s work in chemical kinetics . That night , he attends a departmental get together at Chairman Littelby s , and becomes so fed up with the other professors blaming him for the death that he puts his job on the line and accuses them back . He is also disrespectful to Littelby with a nearly outright demand for tenure . On Sunday , he reads through Ralph s research notebooks and realizes that Ralph s data had been faked , a cardinal sin in chemistry . When Doheny returns , he tells him about the faking , suggesting it as a possible motive for suicide . Doheny , however , twists it around and says that Brade might have been trying to protect his own reputation by hiding the fraud . The next day , after his lectures in the university , he again meets with Cap Anson , and immediately afterward in the lab , nearly triggers a chemical reaction which would have killed him . Now resolved to solve the mystery , he questions student Roberta Goodhue in the presence of Doheny . She admits that she and Neufeld had had an argument about the faked data . The only person who could have overheard was Cap Anson . Doheny then tricks Anson into revealing that he knows about the attempt on Brade s life and Anson confesses .

<|childrens|>The book is about twelve forest creatures whose mates disappear after being crystallized by a dark dust that falls every evening . The forest creatures combine forces with Zac the handsome woodcarver , Ana his beautiful half elf , half human wife , and their timid , chubby , winged doth Pook to save the creatures and restore the dying forest .

<|comedy|>Guts begins with the narrator telling the reader to hold their breath for the duration of the story . The narrator then describes several unnerving incidents involving adolescent boys masturbating . First , he describes a boy inserting a lubricated carrot into his rectum to stimulate his prostate while masturbating , and then hiding the carrot in a pile of laundry . His mother later takes the laundry away and presumably discovers the lubricated carrot , but never mentions it to him . Next , the narrator describes a young boy inserting a thin stick of candle wax into his urethra to stimulate it while masturbating . The wax slips back into the boy s bladder , which causes his urine flow to be stopped almost entirely and blood to seep from his penis . It requires expensive surgery to remove it , which the parents pay for using all the money from the boy s college savings . The narrator then refers , in passing , to numerous boys of about the same age accidentally asphyxiating themselves while masturbating , a fad to which a spike in teenage suicide rates is attributed . Finally , the narrator describes an incident in which he sat on the water intake at the bottom of a swimming pool while masturbating in a process he refers to as Pearl diving . The suction causes his rectum and lower intestines to prolapse and become tangled in the filter , forcing the narrator to gnaw through his own innards to free himself and avoid drowning . The narrator s sister later becomes impregnated by semen deposited by the narrator in the pool , which results in her having an abortion . In the case of the three core incidents , although the parents of the boys involved knew about the incident , they never discussed it afterwards , causing all three to figuratively hold their breath while they waited for the reaction that never came . It is also called the boys invisible carrot in a reference to the first story where the boys mother discovers the carrot he had placed in his anus to achieve a more pleasurable orgasm . Purportedly all three of these incidents are based on true stories . According to Palahniuk , the first two tales came from his friends experiences and the third he heard while shadowing sexual addiction support groups as research for Choke . In one of these groups , he met an extremely thin man . When Palahniuk asked him how he stayed so thin , he told him I had a massive bowel resectioning . When Palahniuk asked what he meant , he told him the story which was the basis for the third episode in Guts .

<|fantasy|>The story concerns four people Dr . Lionel Barrett , a physicist with an interest in parapsychology , his wife Edith , and two mediums Florence Tanner , a Spiritualist and mental medium , and Benjamin Franklin Fischer , a physical medium who are hired by dying millionaire William Reinhardt Deutsch to investigate the possibility of life after death . To do so , they must enter the infamous Belasco House in Maine , regarded as the most haunted house in the world . The house is called Hell House due to the horrible acts of blasphemy and perversion that occurred there under the silent influence and supervision of Emeric Belasco . Fischer is the only survivor of a failed investigation attempt thirty years earlier . The novel combines supernatural horror with mystery as the researchers attempt to investigate the haunting of the house while their sanity is subtly undermined by its sinister supernatural influence . During the investigation , various influences begin to affect each character s personal weaknesses Florence through her belief in Spiritualism and her over eagerness to rid the house of its evil Dr . Barrett through his almost arrogant disbelief in disregard for Spiritualism , his belief in science , and his debilitated physical condition having suffered from polio when young Edith through her personal fears , insecurities and pent up desires and Fischer through his deliberate inaction which he calls caution . Hell House s potency comes from its apparent ability to corrupt those who enter its walls , before bringing about their destruction , both mental and physical .