The jungle city of Bassakesh holds the keys to the future of the Vreski Empire; it is the sole source of the valuable Vedegga dye.Delesse, the Governor's daughter, is marrying Loken, heir to one of the most powerful Clans in the Empire.When plague disrupts the wedding plans, Delesse, with her friends, has to fight to save the city, punish its enemies, and marry the man she loves.
"Rich detail and vivid anecdotes of adventure....A treasure trove of exotic fact and hard thinking." —New York Times Book Review For millennia, lions, tigers, and their man-eating kin have kept our dark, scary forests dark and scary, and their predatory majesty has been the stuff of folklore. But by the year 2150 big predators may only exist on the other side of glass barriers and chain-link fences. Their gradual disappearance is changing the very nature of our existence. We no longer occupy an intermediate position on the food chain; instead we survey it invulnerably from above—so far above that we are in danger of forgetting that we even belong to an ecosystem. Casting his expert eye over the rapidly diminishing areas of wilderness where predators still reign, the award-winning author of The Song of the Dodo and The Tangled Tree examines the fate of lions in India's Gir forest, of saltwater crocodiles in northern Australia, of brown bears in the mountains of Romania, and of Siberian tigers in the Russian Far East. In the poignant and troublesome ferocity of these embattled creatures, we recognize something primeval deep within us, something in danger of vanishing forever.
The #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, named one of the best books of the year by The Boston Globe and National Geographic: acclaimed journalist Douglas Preston takes readers on a true adventure deep into the Honduran rainforest in this riveting narrative about the discovery of a lost civilization -- culminating in a stunning medical mystery. Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization. Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease. Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.
A study of Salman Rushdie's seven published novels, with a special focus on his earliest, "Grimus", and his most provocative, "Midnight's Children", "Shame" and "The Satanic Verses". It shows how Rushdie employs cosmology, mythology and mysticism to structure otherworldly dramas.
The Primal Land is the story of the Bonda tribe inhabiting a mountainous portion of Orissa. The novel includes faint glimmers of political awakening among the semi-literate Bondas about their exploitation, even though the only incorruptible outsider who works for the betterment of the Bondas, a women schoolteacher, is suspended, there is hope for the Bondas yet.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this meticulously edited collection of the complete works by Rudyard Kipling: Novels: The Light That Failed Captain Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks Kim The Naulahka: A Story of West and East Stalky and Co. Short Story Collections: The City of Dreadful Night Plain Tales from the Hills Soldier's Three (The Story of the Gadsbys) Soldier's Three - Part II The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories Under the Deodars Wee Willie Winkie Life's Handicap Many Inventions The Jungle Book The Second Jungle Book The Day's Work Just So Stories Traffics and Discoveries Puck of Pook's Hill Actions and Reactions Abaft the Funnel Rewards and Fairies The Eyes of Asia A Diversity of Creatures Land and Sea Tales Debits and Credits Thy Servant a Dog Limits and Renewals Poetry Collections: Departmental Ditties Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads The Seven Seas An Almanac of Twelve Sports The Five Nations Songs from Books The Years Between Other Poems Military Collections: A Fleet in Being France at War The New Army in Training Sea Warfare The War in the Mountains The Graves of the Fallen The Irish Guards in the Great War I & II Travel Collections: American Notes From Sea to Sea Letters of Travel: 1892 – 1913 Souvenirs of France Brazilian Sketches: 1927 How Shakespeare Came to Write the 'Tempest' Autobiographies: A Book of Words Something of Myself Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He wrote tales and poems of British soldiers in India and stories for children. He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".
A powerful novel about two sisters who must reclaim themselves after their lives are dramatically upended, from an award-winning author with “a wonderfully original and limber voice” (The New York Times) “[Nick Laird’s] kinetic prose, full of insight about politics, history and religion, dazzles eye and ear." –The New York Times Book Review “Nick Laird takes two experiences poles apart and unites them in gorgeous language…[with] fierce tenderness. ” –Dave Eggers, author of Heroes of the Frontier Alison Donnelly has suffered for love. Still stuck in the small Northern Irish town where she was born, working for her father’s real estate agency, she hopes a second marriage will help her get her life back together. Her sister Liz, a fiercely independent professor who lives in New York City, is about to return to Ulster for Alison’s wedding, before heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about the world’s newest religion. Both sisters hope to write their own futures, but the past has other ideas. Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find that her new husband has a past neither of them can escape. While Liz, in a rainforest on the other side of the planet, finds herself increasingly entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the charismatic middle-aged woman she has come to film, the leader of a cargo cult. As Modern Gods ingeniously interweaves the stories of Liz and Alison, it becomes clear that both sisters must learn how to negotiate with the past, with the sins of fanaticism, and decide exactly what the living owe to the dead. Laird’s brave, innovative novel charts the intimacies and disappointments of a family trying to hold itself together, and the repercussions of history and belief.
