A Chinese-Canadian architect and her sister travel to Hong Kong to care for their ill father, and discover he’s being blackmailed by an enemy from his past.
Family secrets surface when two sisters travel to Hong Kong to care for their ill father. When Jill Lau receives an early morning phone call that her elderly father has fallen gravely ill, she and her sister, Celeste, catch the first flight from Toronto to Hong Kong. The man they find languishing in the hospital is a barely recognizable shadow of his old, indomitable self. According to his housekeeper, a couple of mysterious photographs arrived anonymously in the mail in the days before his collapse. These pictures are only the first link in a chain of events that begin to reveal the truth about their father’s past and how he managed to escape from Guangzhou, China, during the Cultural Revolution to make a new life for himself in Hong Kong. Someone from the old days has returned to haunt him — exposing the terrible things he did to survive and flee one of the most violent periods of Chinese history, reinvent himself, and make the family fortune. Can Jill piece together the story of her family’s past without sacrificing her father's love and reputation?
Two colonies set out from Earth. One would travel the solar system and return in fifty years. The other, by design, would never come back. The crew of the returning ship, however, finds that during its absence, it missed a rather crucial planetary event: the Apocalypse. Soon the last remaining humans--those in the second, wandering colony--are about to be thrust into a final battle for souls between the forces of good and evil. Evil is much better prepared for the fight, though. The futures of both mankind and the afterlife depend upon the actions of all the humans caught in the struggles. Even though the forces they are up against are no less powerful than deity, humans with enough willpower can sometimes do amazing things...
A Master Chief story and original full-length novel set in the Halo universe—based on the New York Times bestselling video game series! 2526. It has been more than a year since humanity first encountered the hostile military alliance of alien races known as the Covenant, and several weeks after the United Nations Space Command’s devastating counterattack of Operation: SILENT STORM was deemed an overwhelming success. The UNSC has put its faith in the hands of the Spartans, led by the legendary Master Chief, John-117: enhanced super-soldiers raised and trained from childhood via a clandestine black ops project to be living weapons. But the Covenant—enraged and fearful of their enemy’s unexpected strategies and prowess—is not taking its recent defeat lightly, and is now fully determined to eradicate humanity from existence, brutally overrunning the ill-fated planets of the Outer Colonies faster than retreats can be ordered. If the UNSC has any chance of stemming the tide of the war, the Master Chief and Blue Team must drop onto an empty, hellish world in order to capture a disabled Covenant frigate filled with valuable technology. It has all the makings of a trap, but the bait is far too tempting to ignore—and this tantalizing prize is being offered by a disgraced and vengeful Covenant fleetmaster, whose sole opportunity for redemption lies in extinguishing humanity’s only hope of survival…
Robots are merely machines until they escape the bounds of programming and reveal that spark called free will. Yet that gift of consciousness may be only an illusion, a facade of elaborate imitation. Not even Turing's test can prove otherwise. But there is a way they can show their soul. If they were asked to help save humankind, could they? If so, would they?
Sixteen-year-old Callie Knowles fights her compulsion to write constantly, even on herself, as she struggles to cope with foster care, her mother's life in a mental institution, and her belief that she killed her father, a minister, who has been missing for a year.
This acclaimed twenty-first–century Russian novel is “a Dantean descent” into the abandoned Soviet gulags, written “with a clear poetic sensibility” (The Wall Street Journal). In Sergei Lebedev’s debut novel, an unnamed young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a mysterious neighbor who once saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where man and machine work in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today’s Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel is an epic literary act of bearing witness, attempting to rescue history from the brink of oblivion. A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Novel of the Year “Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn has Russia had a writer as obsessed as Sergei Lebedev with that country’s history or the traces it has left on the collective consciousness . . . The best of Russia’s younger generation of writers.” ―The New York Review of Books
Rita Takemitsu is a newly single mother raising her daughter in 1980s Toronto. When her mother, Lily, goes missing, Rita sets out to find her. In the course of her quest, Rita uncovers a host of secrets surrounding her mother’s internment at a camp in the California desert during the Second World War and the truth about her mysterious father.
First Lieutenant Shaara was dead this morning. Her captain is furious at her. She wasted company resources getting herself killed, and it’s coming out of her paycheck. Now, she’s sitting across from the first other human being she’s seen in six years. His name is Adnan. He claims to come from Earth—but that’s impossible. Earth died a long time ago. If Adnan’s telling the truth, he and the decaying ship the captain pulled him off are nearly a thousand years old. Wherever he’s from, he’s Shaara’s responsibility now. Which is the last thing she needs. But it’s either that, or the captain sells Adnan into slavery. Shaara knows what that would mean. Most humans do. And something inside her won’t let her abandon Adnan to it: revenant memories, stabbed awake by the look in his eyes. Facing those memories won’t be easy. It’d be far easier to ignore the feeling driving her forward. Far easier to let it all go to hell, and drift back to sleep. Until a shadowy new faction starts stoking the fires of war. They’re looking for Adnan; Earth’s last survivor holds the key to unleash a terrible, indiscriminate vengeance on the galaxy that wronged them. Who they are is a mystery—to everyone but Shaara. Hard as she’s tried to forget, she knows them all too well. Which means she’s the only one who can stop them. The question is: does she want to? Maybe the galaxy’s earned a little vengeance. The first book in the trilogy, Oblivion's Cloak, won First Place in the Space Opera category at the 2023 Cygnus Awards!
Shaara is running out of friends. The sacrifices she and Warden made two years ago bought the League time, not victory. The war against the Undying has left them exhausted, drained of everything but hope—and precious little of that. The simple fact is that the Undying are going to win. Warden knows it, Shaara knows it. The Undying sure as hell know it. Until, out of the black, the Eternal comes to Shaara with an offer she can’t refuse, however much she’d like to. The threat he warned her about two years ago is real, and now it’s come calling. It cares nothing for their little war. All life in the galaxy, Undying or not, will end if it spreads unchecked. Shaara and the Eternal have little choice but to work together to destroy it . . . At least, for now. But people on both sides aren’t happy with an alliance, however temporary. Some of them are willing to risk all that lives just for a shot at power—and revenge. If Shaara can’t find a way to defeat them, she and the few friends she has left will lose more than their lives. They’ll lose everything.