When Jack Churchill and Ruth Gallagher encounter a terrifying, misshapen giant beneath a London bridge they are plunged into a mystery which portends the end of the world as we know it. All over the country, the ancient gods of Celtic myth are returning to the land from which they were banished millennia ago. Following in their footsteps are creatures of folklore: fabulous bests, wonders and dark terrors. As technology starts to fail, Jack and Ruth are forced to embark on a desperate quest for four magical items - the last chance for humanity in the face of powers barely comprehended.
A memoir and cultural history the World’s End, a West London area once home to bohemian artists and punk rock and now an outpost of neoliberalism. Charlie Gere’s account of growing up in the World’s End area of West London during the Cold War combines local history, cultural history, memoir, and a strong sense of the apocalyptic. Once a rundown part of Chelsea at the wrong end of the King’s Road, the World’s End has long been a place for bohemian writers and artists, including Turner, Whistler, Beckett, Bacon, and Bacon’s muse Henrietta Moraes, all of whom evinced an appropriate apocalyptic sensibility. After World War II, in which the area suffered severe bombing, it became a center of the counterculture that emerged from what Jeff Nuttall called “Bomb Culture,” formed by the threat of nuclear annihilation. The famous boutique Granny Takes a Trip opened there in 1966, joined later on by Hung On You, Puss Weber’s Flying Dragon Tea Room, and the commune Gandalf’s Garden. The area also featured trepanning aristocrats and pet lions, among other eccentricities. In the 1970s, the World’s End was the center of punk rock. Gere’s parents arrived as part of a wave of gentrification, and Gere, born and brought up there, witnessed its social and cultural evolution. As an adolescent, he was traumatized by the prospect of nuclear war. He has lived long enough to see the World’s End now bearing the marks of out-of-control neoliberalism and its grotesque accompanying inequality. But this too shall pass as worlds end.
Haunted by the burden of his family's traitorous past, woozy with pot, cheap wine and sex, and disturbed by a frighteningly real encounter with some family ghosts, Walter van Brunt is about to have a collision with history. It will lead Walter to search for his lost father. And it will send the story into the past of the Hudson River Valley, from the late 1960's back to the anticommunist riots of the 1940's to the late seventeenth century, where the long-hidden secrets of three families--the aristocratic van Warts, the Native-American Mohonks, and Walter's own ancestors, the van Brunts--will be revealed.
In 1835, Charles Darwin observed variations among the Galapagos Islands' species that inspired him to formulate the theory of natural selection. Eighty-eight years later, in 1923, a scientific expedition sponsored by the New York Zoological Society followed in Darwin's wake. Led by the author, a biologist and explorer, the scientists visited the the islands to study and obtain specimens of indigenous plants and animals. This is his personal account of that expedition. He recounts the expedition's productive results, including specimens of 60 species previously unknown to science, and an unparalleled accumulation of data that stimulated many scientific papers and new avenues of naturalistic inquiry.
Ever since returning from Dormia, Alfonso has enjoyed sleeping in a bed like a normal person. No more waking up at the top of a tree or the edge of a cliff. In fact, no sleepwalking at all. But then, while visiting France on a class trip, Alfonso feels that strange and familiar pull of sleep. Upon waking, he finds himself in the belly of a ship headed to Egypt. In his backpack are a few old books and a vial of medicine he stole while asleep. Something is calling Alfonso back to Dormia. Perhaps it’s the Founding Tree? Or perhaps it's the man he sees in his dreams—the one who looks just like his deceased father? Whatever it is, Alfonso is powerless to resist. Storytellers Jake Halpern and Peter Kujawinski take Alfonso on another fantastical quest to Dormia—and beyond—to a vast underground world that holds the answer to a terrifying message: Let me tell you of a dark shadow tree and the world's end.
A killer comet speeds for Earth, big enough to wipe out all life and choke the atmosphere for a century. When the news breaks, soft-spoken freshman Charlotte Hartland gets caught in a flood of panicked students on her college campus-until a black SUV swoops in to extract her. Charlotte's powerful grandfather has saved her a cryosleep berth at the Bunker Reservation Project, a hastily formed effort to save humanity from extinction. When the idealistic program begins to unravel, Charlotte will have to fight for her place in the future. But the only person who can help her is a hotheaded construction worker with a grudge against her family-and the clock is counting down to disaster.
A humorous look at life in and around the Worlds End Chelsea, with my father Cyril at the helm. Follow him on his journey from near poverty as a child to his great success as a parent, and a trusted and much valued interior decorator for many of the great and good of his time.
The Well as the World's End is the best-selling classic heralded as the grandfather of world-building fantasy literature. Ralph of Upmeads, the youngest son of King Peter, has acted against his parents' wishes to pursue adventure. But Ralph does not want just any quest. He seeks out the Well at the World's End—a magical well famed to bring immortality to those who drink from it. As Ralph begins his venture across the land he is haunted by dreams of a strange woman—the Servant of the Well. When he meets Ursula, a woman of incredible likeness to the one he dreamed, will he continue his quest or fall in love? Credited with inspiring both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, The Well as the World's End even features a horse named Shadowfax and a king named Gandolf. The Well at the World's End is being released as a part of Momentum's Classic Fantasy Fiction series.
