The Fountain of Youth water was real - and Elvis and Mark Twain were looking for it. Could a young woman and teenage pickpocket beat them to it? And this other guy - the tall, good-looking hunk who kept popping up - was he really a vampire? Join Bella and Artie as they travel to Australia, hoping to ‘acquire’ the little blue bottle of Fountain of Youth elixir from Master Simon and Marty Melbourne, seasoned time travelers who are on a mission to find James Melbourne – the ‘fairy’ (time traveler) who arrived at the Land Down Under with The First Fleet of convicts – over two hundred years earlier.
In this beautiful book for children, a child tells her story of losing a beloved neighbor and friend. A young girl remembers playing with her neighbor’s cat, stories that her neighbor told her, and the special mementos her friend kept on a shelf above her kitchen sink, including a little blue bottle she kept to remind her of Psalm 56:8: “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.” A Little Blue Bottle doesn’t provide pat answers or heavy-handed messages about life or death, but allows the grieving child to articulate her loss and her love for the deceased friend, while wondering how God is near when we suffer. A gentle and insightful resource for children who are grieving, and for those who care for them. Age range: 3 - 8 years old
Brian Keeping was a young closeted gay mechanic who lived in Ashbrooke, one of the most un-PC homophobic, backward little towns in mid-west America. One day the traveling circus came to town and he, along with his two best friends, thought maybe a trip to the circus would be a welcome diversion from the monotony of their sleepy little town, but to their horror everything went terribly wrong. It seemed their sleepy little towns dark history was about to come back to haunt them as a result of a heinous crime that had been committed sixty years earlier. The zealous pastor and self appointed moral leader of Ashbrooke, Harry Farwell, coaxed his congregation to rise up and run the "sinful" Fink and Zimner Freak Show and Circus out of town. Instead they ended up putting it to the torch and condemning the circus and it's performers to a horrible fiery death. All but one that was... the sole survivor, the circus' fortune teller Madame Zadora, was in possession of a mysterious tonic she acquired from her motherland Romania, which had the potential to bring upon the town, a horrible curse of the UNDEAD. Now the new circus has come to town and all hell is about to break loose, in more ways than one. This Zombie fest of the highest order takes the genre to places it's never been before and we know you will be DYING to read it!
This extraordinary debut novel from Whiting Writers’ Award winner John Wray is a poetic portrait of a life redeemed at one of the darkest moments in world history. Twenty years after deserting the army in the first world war, Oskar Voxlauer returns to the village of his youth. Haunted by his past, he finds an uneasy peace in the mountains–but it is 1938 and Oskar cannot escape from the rising tide of Nazi influence in town. He attempts to retreat to the woods, only to be drawn back by his own conscience and the chilling realization that the woman whose love might finally save him is bound to the local SS commander. Morally complex, brilliantly plotted, and heartbreakingly realized, The Right Hand of Sleep marks the beginning of an important literary career.
A casual introduction, a challenge to a simple game of chess, a lovers' reunion, a meaningless infidelity: from such small seeds Zweig brings forth five startlingly tense tales--meditations on the fragility of love, the limits of obsession, the combustibility of secrets and betrayal. To read anything by Zweig is to risk addiction; in this collection the power of his writing--which, with its unabashed intensity and narrative drive, made him one of the bestselling and most acclaimed authors in the world--is clear and irresistible. Each of these stories is a bolt of experience, unforgettable and unique. Five of Stefan Zweig's most powerful novellas, containing some of his most famous and best-loved work: • Burning Secret • A Chess Story • Fear • Confusion • Journey into the Past (Stand alone paperback editions of individual novellas from Pushkin and New York Review of Books will remain in print.)
In this brand new reimagining, Mary Jane—the red-headed spark from Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, who stole Huck's heart in just 30 pages—comes to life with her own story of adventuring down the Mississippi River in the 1840s. Meet Mary Jane Guild — she’s on a dangerous and unpredictable adventure down the Mississippi River — and she’ll steal Huck Finn’s heart along the way. In his classic work Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain briefly introduces "Mary Jane, the red-headed one." In no time Mary Jane becomes the girl Huck thinks about "a many and a many million times." Now author Hope Jahren has created for Mary Jane a life as vivid and compelling as Huck's. These pages will show you the real Mary Jane. A girl on her own dangerous, unpredictable journey down the Mississippi River in pre-Civil War America. Equipped with an uncanny ability for mathematics, a talent for sewing, and a bale of beaver skins, Mary Jane navigates deadly illnesses, angry mobs, treacherous landowners, outright thieves and swindlers, and more than a thousand miles of muddy water. What’s more, she thrives in the face of these challenges, thanks to support from strangers who become friends. Traveling solo requires Mary Jane to grow up fast, but it ultimately leads her to a new resilience, a love of adventure, deep and enduring sisterhood, and a blue-eyed, ponytailed boy she can’t stop thinking about. Jahren offers a wealth of layered characters and deeply researched, authentic details of changing times in the North and South. Using the language and style of Twain and shifting the point of view to a smart and determined young woman, she explores timeless themes of duty, family, romance, and betrayal, with grit and courage at the core.
