The third novel in The Conrad Chronicles series finds Gloria of the House of Vasilis married to Ambassador Arsilin Lucas and living on Earth. While she bears and raises three children with the assistance of her loyal friend Hobbs, her brother, Zeplan, is aboard the Galactic Falcon, endeavoring to foil Xavier of the House of Baldemar's plans to eradicate all the humans living on the planet Karna. Unfortunately Gloria and Zeplan don't know that Xavier has located Gloria and arrived on Earth to challenge her to Death Duel in order to absorb her Light-given abilities. What Xavier doesn't know is that The Chosen One, Gloria's youngest child, Lucy, has been born, and that this seven year old girl will change all his plans.
Lucy Gloria Vasilis Lucas struggles to accept her new life. She no longer is seen as the daughter of Ambassador Arsilin Lucas, the child who witnessed her mother's murder, but is now valued as the daughter of Gloria of the House of Vasilis, a Conrad of the Light, and the Chosen One who is destined to defeat Xavier of the House of Baldemar. At the age of eighteen, Lucy has gone from living at Willow Manor on Earth to living aboard the space ship, the Galactic Falcon. Her life has gone from one of surviving the brutality of the adults around her to being presented with a universe full of options. The magnitude of these sudden changes has sent Lucy's mind into shock. As Lucy adjusts to space living, and slowly accepts she is alive and not delusional, she finds herself trying to accept the concept of being a Conrad, a human able to control energy. In addition, she must get to know her Uncle Zeplan, an uncle she never knew existed until the day he rescued her off of Earth.
Book 2 in the Conrad Chronicles begins with Xavier locked in a thousand cycle Death Duel with Gloria's twin sister Thera. Gloria, Regal, and the other Conrads of the Light struggle to heal the damage Xavier, his Outcasts, and his Carmine army have caused to the planet Karna and her inhabitants. As the Conrads of the Light work at advancing Karna's decimated technology, they come to learn that during Karna's former years, under the reigning High Kings, ships of people left to colonize other planets and head out to learn more while waiting for the Death Duel to end.
For 250 planet cycles the elders concealed their secret: they had been exiled from Karna for using their Conrad abilities. Upon settling the planet Aleron they raised their children and continued to evolve as handlers of energy forces. The Conrads of the Light believed their thriving, peaceful world would endure. When ""the children"" learn of the exile, the Conrad utopian world on Aleron disintegrates. Desiring to become the next Conrad leader, Xavier of the House of Baldemar craves vengeance. He convinces several of his peers to follow him on his quest to annihilate the humans of Karna. Meanwhile, Gloria of the House of Vasilis is assailed by guilt over the questions she asked that sparked Xavier's desire for revenge. Forced into a position of leadership, Gloria is sent by the elders to stop Xavier. Gloria doubts her own abilities, especially when her twin sister chooses to follow Xavier.
“Always perfectly magical.” —Neil Gaiman A timeless classic with brand-new cover art! Diana Wynne Jones’s bestselling, magical, and funny Chrestomanci novels will enchant fans of Soman Chainani, Rick Riordan, and Chris Colfer. Volume II contains The Magicians of Caprona and Witch Week. In the Magicians of Caprona, the two warring families of Caprona, the Montanas and the Petrocchis, must join forces to keep the White Devil from invading their city. Even Chrestomanci becomes involved when two of the youngest family members, Tonino Montana and Angelica Petrocchi, go missing. Their unusual magical powers will be key to stopping the White Devil. Witch Week takes place in a world where witches are burned at the stake, so when a note reading “Someone in this class is a witch” appears in Class 6B, it’s no laughing matter. Only Chrestomanci can sort out the mess that the students of 6B get themselves into. The second of three volumes, the Chronicles of Chrestomanci can be read in any order.
This is the first English translation of a chronicle written in Latin during the thirteenth century at the traveling court of Manfred von Hohenstaufen, King of Sicily, son and heir of the great Frederick II, who ruled lands and peoples from Saxony to Sicily
The Dresden Files meets American Gods in New York City. What would you do if you lost everything that mattered to you, as well as all means to protect yourself and others, but still had to save the day? Conrad Brent is about to find out. Conrad Brent protects the people of Brooklyn from monsters and magical threats. The snarky, wisecracking guardian also has a dangerous secret: he's one in a million - literally. Magical ability comes to about one in every 30,000 and can manifest at any age. Conrad is rarer than this, however. He's a middling, one of the half-gifted and totally despised. Most of the gifted community feels that middlings should be instantly killed. The few who don't flat out hate them still aren't excited to be around middlings. Meaning Conrad can't tell anyone, not even his best friends, what he really is. Conrad hides in plain sight by being a part of the volunteer Watch, those magically gifted who protect their cities from dangerous, arcane threats. And, to pay the bills, Conrad moonlights as a private detective and monster hunter for the gifted community. Which helps him keep up his personal fiction - that he's a magical version of Batman. Conrad does both jobs thanks to charms, artifacts, and his wits, along with copious amounts of coffee. But little does he know that events are about to change his life...forever. When Conrad discovers the Traveling Fair auction house has another middling who's just manifested her so-called powers on the auction block, he's determined to save her, regardless of risk. But what he finds out while doing so is even worse - the winning bidder works for a company that's just created the most dangerous chemical weapon to ever hit the magical community. Before Conrad can convince anyone at the Watch of the danger, he's exposed for what he really is. Now, stripped of rank, magical objects, friends and allies, Conrad has to try to save the world with only his wits. Thankfully though, no one's taken away his coffee.
When his uncle sends him to work at the mysterious Stallery Mansion, twelve-year-old Conrad Tesdinic must overcome his bad karma and discover the source of the magic that threatens to pull his world into one of the eleven other parallel universes.
This intimate, shocking—and thoroughly unauthorized—portrait of the Hiltons chronicles the family’s amazing odyssey from poverty and obscurity to glory and glamour. From Conrad Hilton, the eccentric “innkeeper to the world” who built a global empire beginning with a fleabag in a dusty Texas backwater, to Paris Hilton, his great-granddaughter, whose fame took off with a sex video, House of Hilton is the unauthorized, eye-popping portrait of one of America’s most outrageous dynasties. If you want to know how Paris Hilton became who she is, you have to know where she came from. From scores of candid and exclusive interviews, from private documents and public records, New York Times bestselling author Jerry Oppenheimer has dug deeply into her paternal and maternal family roots to reveal the often shocking, tragic, and comic lives that helped shape the world’s most famous and fabulous “celebutante.” The cast of characters includes Paris’s maternal grandmother, a materialistic “stage mother from hell.” There is Paris’s maternal grandfather, who became an alcoholic housepainter. The life of Paris’s mother, Kathy Hilton, groomed by her mother to be a star and marry rich, is candidly revealed, too, as is that of Paris’s father, Rick, Conrad’s grandson. Paris’s tabloid antics are truly in the Hilton tradition. Set against a glittery Hollywood backdrop—with appearances by stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Natalie Wood, and Joan Collins—House of Hilton brings to light a cornucopia of closely held Hilton family secrets and sexual peccadilloes, such as the many affairs and the nightclub-brawling, boozing, and pill-popping life of Paris’s great-uncle, Nick Hilton. The story of his hellish marriage to Liz Taylor alone rivals any of today’s Hollywood breakups. Behind it all was Conrad Hilton, who built his worldwide empire through the Great Depression while others were jumping out of windows. A devout Catholic publicly, his personal life was that of an unrepentant sinner. His first marriage was to Mary Barron Hilton, a sexy, hard-drinking, gambling Kentucky teenager half Conrad’s age. Wife number two was the gorgeous Zsa Zsa, who, like Paris, was famous for being famous. Their tumultuous marriage and headline-making divorce are revealed here in all their juicy glory. In all, House of Hilton is a gripping American saga, from the fire and passions that built a business empire to the debauchery and amorality passed on from one generation to the next.
CURSED FOR LIFE Conrad Edison is cursed. His foster parents die in horrible ways around his birthday, and he ends up back at the orphanage where he and the other children are treated like indentured servants. Forced to work the farm and other menial chores, Conrad holds no hope for a better life. When a man with the ability to mind-control animals inexplicably tries to kill Conrad, the harrowing scrape with death gives him a new perspective on life. He discovers the man had a flying carpet and a talking phone and that the orphanage is only the front for an insidious slave ring. Determined to elude his cursed fate, Conrad decides to escape the orphanage once and for all. The phone leads him to a magical place called Queens Gate and for the first time in his life, he dares to hope for a better life. But unless he can free himself from the curse, the terrible secret it guards could destroy everything.
