A BOY WITH A BEASTLY SECRET. A VILLAGE ON THE BRINK OF DESTRUCTION. A FINAL CHANCE TO SAVE THEM ALL. Thirteen-year-old Blott Meritum has hidden his freakish ability since he was a toddler. However, as his people hurtle toward starvation, he has no option but to disobey his parents, leave his remote village, and take action. He quickly learns the devastating consequences of this mistake. When everything unravels around him, and he puts everyone he loves in extreme danger, he discovers three things that will change his life forever. 1) The world outside the village harbours unexpected perils. 2) His forbidden ability has the potential to change his people’s whole existence. 3) A sinister voice inside his head wants to unleash an unstoppable evil into the community. With Blott’s friends and family closer to oblivion than ever before, will he keep his humanity and save them? Or will he be consumed by the monster inside him? Blott is the first book in the young adult fantasy series The Canvas Chronicles. If you like Eragon, Percy Jackson, or Artemis Fowl, then you’ll love Daniel Parsons’s original fantasy adventure. Buy Blott to explore this exciting, magical world today!
The landscape is flawless, the trees majestic, the flora and the fauna are right and proper. All is picturesquely typical of rural England at its best. Sir Giles, an MP of few principles and curious tastes, plots to destroy all this by building a motorway smack through it, to line his own pocket and at the same time to dispose of his wife, the capacious Lady Maude. But Lady Maude enlists a surprising ally in her enigmatic gardener Blott, a naturalised Englishman in whom adopted patriotism burns bright. Lady Maude's dynamism and Blott's concealed talents enable them to meet pressure with mimicry, loaded tribunals with publicity and chilli powder, and requisition orders with wickedly spiked beer. This explosively comic novel will gladden the heart of everyone who has ever confronted a bureaucrat, and spells out in riotous detail how the forces of virtue play an exceedingly dirty game when the issue is close to home.
When observing the morning or evening star, Planet Venus, modern-day people recognize it as a lifeless, brightly glowing rock in the sky where no one can go because its atmosphere is far too inhospitable. Yet from ancient times all the way up to the not-too-distant past, it was regarded by some people as the embodiment of supernatural beings who observed them right back. Believing it to be an object of worship in whom one could seek solution to problems and an overseer in the sky who cast judgment over human behavior, in the past Planet Venus was perceived quite differently than it is today. In representation of what the world was like before the true nature of Planet Venus was revealed, Star Bright delves into the inevitable conflicts between spiritualism and the realities of human nature. Adhering to the mythological comportment of deific entities, historical detail, and the societal norms of subject periods and places as well as possible, the sixteen separate stories comprising Star Bright shine light on the human ground game that played out as a result of the mystical significance placed upon the second planet from the sun. Among the many characters in the novel is an ambitious young woman of the Sumer civilization and her extraordinary companion, a fatalistic Israelite king leading an army off to war, and a spoiled rotten countess of the French Bourbon Dynasty who harbors delusions of godhood, just to name a few. From the very earliest establishment of civilization, Planet Venus continues to exact its influence over humankind.
The untold story of the artistic battle between James Abbot MacNeill Whistler and John Ruskin over Whistler’s controversial, ground-breaking Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. In November 1878, America’s greatest painter sued England’s greatest critic for a bad review. The painter won—but ruined himself in the process. The painter: James Abbot MacNeill Whistler, whose combination of incredible talent, unflagging energy, and relentless self-promotion had by that time brought him to the very edge of artistic preeminence. The critic: John Ruskin, Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University, whose four-decades’ worth of prolific and highly respected literary output on aesthetics had made him England’s unchallenged and seemingly unchallengeable arbiter of art. Though Whistler and Ruskin both lived in London and moved in the same artistic world, they had, until June, 1877, managed to remain entirely clear of one another. This was unusual because Whistler had a mercurial temperament, a belligerent personality, and seemed to thrive on opposition: he once challenged a man to a duel because the man accused the painter of sleeping with his wife. (Whistler had, in fact, slept with the man’s wife.) That November, John Ruskin walked into the Grosvenor Gallery’s new exhibition of art and gazed with horror upon Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. The painting was Whistler’s interpretation of a fireworks display at a local pleasure garden. But to Ruskin it was nothing more than a chaotic, incomprehensible mess of bright spots upon dark masses: not art but its antithesis—a disturbing and disgusting assault upon everything he had ever written or taught on the subject. He quickly channeled that anger into a seething review. The internationally-reported, widely discussed, and hugely-entertaining trial that followed was a titanic battle between the opposing ideas and ideals of two larger-than-life personalities. For these two protagonists, Whistler v Ruskin was the battle of a lifetime—or more accurately, a battle of their two lifetimes. Paul Thomas Murphy’s Falling Rocket also recounts James Whistler’s turbulent but triumphant development from artistic oblivion in the 1880s to artistic deification in the 1890s, and also Ruskin’s isolated, befogged, silent final years after his public humiliation. The story of Whistler v Ruskin has a dramatic arc of its own, but this riveting new book also vividly evokes an artistic world in energetic motion, culturally and socially, in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
