Paul's not dead. He might not know much, but he's sure of that. Last he remembers, he was leaving his Bali hotel for a night of partying. Linda's been assigned to mentor him in Heaven - but first she has to get him there. Paul says: "I'm not dead. I just managed to slow my biological processes until I appeared dead. Besides, who would kill me? I'm a positive force for good in this world. Also, I'm a singer." Linda says: "Ugh, this guy is so incredibly stupid. He's convinced that he's not dead, he's just more enlightened than everyone else in the freaking world. Probably read a few books by Deepak Chopra and then took some drugs. Bingo - instant bloody guru."
“A furiously paced finale that reaches for the stars.” —Kirkus Reviews “Gripping.” —School Library Journal (starred review) “Stellar.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) In the highly anticipated finale to the New York Times bestselling trilogy, dictators, prophets, and tensions rise. In a world that’s conquered death, will humanity finally be torn asunder by the immortal beings it created? Citra and Rowan have disappeared. Endura is gone. It seems like nothing stands between Scythe Goddard and absolute dominion over the world scythedom. With the silence of the Thunderhead and the reverberations of the Great Resonance still shaking the earth to its core, the question remains: Is there anyone left who can stop him? The answer lies in the Tone, the Toll, and the Thunder.
“Intelligent and entertaining.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Even better than the first book.” —School Library Journal (starred review) Rowan and Citra take opposite stances on the morality of the Scythedom, putting them at odds, in the chilling sequel to the Printz Honor Book Scythe from New York Times bestseller Neal Shusterman, author of the Unwind dystology. Humans learn from their mistakes. I cannot. I make no mistakes. The Thunderhead is the perfect ruler of a perfect world, but it has no control over the scythedom. A year has passed since Rowan had gone off grid. Since then, he has become an urban legend, a vigilante snuffing out corrupt scythes in a trial by fire. His story is told in whispers across the continent. As Scythe Anastasia, Citra gleans with compassion and openly challenges the ideals of the “new order.” But when her life is threatened and her methods questioned, it becomes clear that not everyone is open to the change. Old foes and new enemies converge, and as corruption within the Scythedom spreads, Rowan and Citra begin to lose hope. Will the Thunderhead intervene? Or will it simply watch as this perfect world begins to unravel?
Having found her place in the Darksmith legacy, Sunshine Saliente is now in the business of mad science. Though she would be more than happy to be spending her time watching clouds drift by and daydreaming of her happy days of living in a treehouse, there’s work to do. The doors of Darksmith Manor have reopened and its first customer has arrived. There are, however, those who would like nothing more than to see the monster-making family come to an end, once and for all.
Grim spent millennia building her rebellion against Satan, but was caught just before she managed to carry it out in full. Now she's being punished by the powers that be; quite unfairly, she wants Linda to help. Well, hell, Heaven does get boring after a few years...
Linda's had a bad day. First her boyfriend killed her. Then she woke up, still on this boring plane of existence, and with an odd obsession about her missing body. Mike won't tell her what he did with her body, and she can't find the stupid thing herself. There's only one thing she can do - torment the bastard until he coughs up the information. This is a very short work - novelette length - around 11000 words or 44 (print) pages. It is the first book in the Deadish series, a loosely-connected set of humorous mystery novelettes. Warning: Frequent foul language, mild sex scenes, and Australian spelling. Not suitable for children. Keywords: Australian, ghost, humour, humor, murder mystery, paranormal, supernatural, novelette, short, free, freebie, first in series, alternative
Sunshine Saliente was a carefree girl, happily adventuring into imagination with her stuffed rabbit, seeking make-believe treasure and hiding from storybook monsters, until the day she met a stranger. That stranger was Death. Fortunately, he was an old family friend. Fear & Sunshine sends Sunshine spiraling into a world of the unknown as she learns of the legacy she left behind and a world she could never imagine that must be saved. Come along for the ride as this little hippie girl claims her place at Darksmith Manor and meets werewolves, the undead, and the twisted experiments of the mad science dynasty she was destined to lead.
Adventure ~ Action Danger ~ Derring-do Rip-snorting action adventures of the What If... What Next... and, most importantly, the And Then... kind. A cohort of Australia's best genre fictioneers, and one bold Kiwi, present a fabulous and strange collection of action-packed adventure stories - each featuring two heroes. The two-volume And Then... anthology features page-turning and genre-bending stories by 32 award-winning, established and emerging Australian writers of crime and speculative fiction. The settings are historical, futuristic and contemporary; the heroes are human, animal, alien and mythical; and their adventures are real-world, far-out, speculative, horror, mystery, science fiction and fantasy. Welcome to And Then... Volume One in which 15 authors travel in time and space from Australia of the Gold Rush to an all-too possible dystopian future, from the Outback to Europe in the 1950s and the 21st Century, and from an apocalyptic New Zealand to worlds of steampunk fantastic and outer space exotic. Their heroes are flawed and fabulous, brave and humble; and their tales are enriched with panthers and budgies and demons and dragons - all manner of creatures real and endangered, ridiculous and heroic. And Then... the Great Big Book of Awesome Adventure Tales Volume 1 features: an introduction by Janeen Webb and stories by: Sulari Gentill, Jason Nahrung, Alan Baxter, Jason Franks, Lucy Sussex, Amanda Wrangles, Evelyn Tsitas, Peter M Ball, Narrelle M Harris, Dan Rabarts, Kat Clay, Sophie Masson, Tor Roxburgh, Emilie Collyer Tansy Rayner Roberts.
This volume contains thematic papers on semantic change which emerged from the second edition of Formal Diachronic Semantics held at Saarland University. Its authorship ranges from established scholars in the field of language change to advanced PhD students whose contributions have equally qualified and have been selected after a two-step peer-review process. The key foci are variablity and diachronic trajectories in scale structures and quantification, but readers will also find a variety of further (and clearly non-disjoint) issues covered including reference, modality, givenness, presuppositions, alternatives in language change, temporality, epistemic indefiniteness, as well as - in more general terms - the interfaces of semantics with syntax, pragmatics and morphology. Given the nature of the field, the contributions are primarily based on original corpus studies (in one case also on synchronic experimental data) and present a series of new findings and theoretical analyses of several languages, first and foremost from the Germanic and Romance subbranches of Indo-European (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish) and from Semitic (with an analysis of universal quantification in Biblical Hebrew).
