Showing results by narrator "Raphael Corkhill" in All Categories

There's just no rest for Valek, Ixia’s Chief of Security. Challenges are constant and new problems arrive daily, including a request to help Castletown’s watch solve the mystery of a string of nighttime disturbances, and keeping a close eye on the Commander’s food taster as she schemes her way back into business. As if that isn't enough, the Commander’s life is threatened. Is the assassination attempt on the Commander a declaration of war by the Sitian Council, or is it a ruse by an unknown party to incite a war between Ixia and Sitia?

A Distant Episode contains the best of Paul Bowles's short stories, as selected by the author. An American cult figure, Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Jay McInerney.

Travels is a thrilling anthology of the travel writings of Paul Bowles, author of the era-defining post-war novel The Sheltering Sky. The acclaimed essays in Travel—never before collected in a single volume—span more than sixty years and range from Bowles’s early days in Paris to his time spent in Ceylon, Thailand, Kenya, and his expatriate life in Morocco. Insightful, exciting, and evocative, Travels is a stunning collection of rarely seen shorter works—a showcase of the literary artistry of one of the truly great American writers of the twentieth century.

For the first time in this ancient bloodstained story, the tournament is breaking. The boundaries between the city of Ilvernath and the arena have fallen. Reporters swarm the historic battlegrounds. A dead boy now lives again. And a new champion has entered the fray, one who seeks to break the curse for good...no matter how many lives are sacrificed in the process. As the curse teeters closer and closer to collapse, the surviving champions each face a choice: dismantle the tournament piece by piece, or fight to the death as this story always intended.

Jonathan Lambshead stands to inherit his deceased grandfather’s overstuffed mansion - a veritable cabinet of curiosities - once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But the three soon discover that the house is filled with far more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley has stormed back to life on a magic-fueled rampage across a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of Europe replete with talking animals (and vegetables).

The Hemorrhage Virus tore through America and swept the globe, leaving no country untouched. New Zealand was no exception. Those infected mutated into monsters, monsters that became known as Variants. Seven weeks have passed since Jack and Dee's quiet world shattered. Along with a small band of survivors, they fled to Mayor Island. Determined to help stem the Variant scourge, they volunteer for what remains of the army. Led by Captain Ben Johns, a grizzly retired NZ SAS soldier, they are sent on a dangerous mission to rescue a scientist.

Jack Gee, hiking the New Zealand mountains, is blissfully unaware of the Hemorrhage virus sweeping the world. A desperate message from his wife, Dee, alerts him, and he must return to Hamilton. On the way, he is captured by flesh-eating Variants and taken to their meat locker. To escape, he will need to draw on all his experience as an outdoorsman, but first, he must find the will to survive. Surrounded by Variants, Dee is trapped in her Hamilton basement with a group of survivors. With Jack missing, and dwindling food supplies, she must leave the basement, her only defense a katana.

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

Kamal Agha is a patriot. A Special Investigator for the secret police, Kamal is part of the battle against increasing political turmoil throughout the continent. But the Caliphate's iron fist spares no one, and Kamal's own family has attracted the regime's ever-watchful eye. Into his troubled life comes a mysterious stranger, Ayman Rasheed, found near the banks of the River Seine, naked and covered in tattoos. Tattoos which hint at an enormous secret - one which has changed the history of the world beyond recognition.

The dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures, recurrent themes of Paul Bowles’s writings, are dramatized with brutal honesty in this novel set in Fez, Morocco, during that country’s 1954 nationalist uprising. Totally relevant to today’s political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere, richly descriptive of its setting, and uncompromising in its characterizations, The Spider’s House is perhaps Bowles’s best, most beautifully subtle novel.

An American cult figure, Paul Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Tobias Wolff. From “The Delicate Prey” to “Too Far from Home,” this definitive collection celebrates the Bowles’s masterful artistry in short fiction.

On a diplomatic mission, Brax and his rider, Carmen the assassin, encounter a ghostly vision of the Nameless Goddess. She's a part leopard, part crocodile deity, who warns them she is coming to conquer their world. Brax, in his usual snarky way, makes fun of her hairy legs and, after she vanishes, dismisses this threat. But things soon get a lot worse... When the duo arrives at the capital of the Akkad empire, they discover the emperor has been horrifically murdered by what looks to be an astral servant of that goddess, and his young nephew ascends to the throne.

A barely employed tech worker has never felt they belonged. Not in society, not even in their own family. Their days are filled with loneliness, a struggle to survive and a desperate search for connection—even if that connection is merely virtual. Now, a black-market hacker promises to open a new world for them, and it works—in ways no human has ever experienced. They find a world of wonder, of possibilities and of danger—where their new virtual reality could mean the end of their physical reality. And what they discover could change the fate of humankind—forever.

After a lifetime of hunting down criminals, Ryan just wants to live out his days in peace and in the shadows of Tokyo to grieve the loss of his wife and son. But his old team - the Nameless, experts in extraction and recon - comes with an urgent request for help. The young daughter of one of his closest friends, a girl he once treated as his own, has been kidnapped.

In Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles plots the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyar, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles's second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.

The Duke of Ravenscar intended to debut the most acclaimed ballerina in the civilized world to open his London theater. But when the ship arrives with an understudy, Drake is convinced the fortune he has invested will be forfeit. Until he sees the woman dance. Britannia LeClair arrives in London excited to be performing the lead in La Sylphide. A foundling, she has had to work harder and with more determination than anyone in the corps. At last, her debut in London proves her worth despite her lowly birth. Until she meets the smoldering gaze of the Duke of Ravenscar.

Maria and William seem to have it all: two happy children, a beautiful house, a thriving business. But when their home is invaded by David, an ex-employee with a score to settle, the couple face a terrifying fight to survive. During the course of one hellish night, David picks apart their carefully constructed life. Secrets are unearthed, truths revealed. And soon David begins to wonder if he’s bitten off more than he can chew—because he’s discovering Maria and William are not the defenseless couple he imagined.

They were sent to investigate the first extraterrestrial signal. What they found was beyond anything they could have imagined - or feared. On a voyage to a mysterious moon in the Alpha Centauri system, the UEA Centaurus meets with disaster. Only the quick thinking of the flight engineer, Rachel Terman, saves some of the crew. Crash-landing on the moon, trillions of kilometers from Earth, they struggle to carry out their mission and try to survive. But nothing has prepared them for what they will face.

Terrified he may be going mad, he must keep the disturbing skill secret. But when it proves helpful in tracking his would-be killer, he has no choice but to embrace the newfound power. The retrocognition leads him to the house of a man recently deceased, where he encounters the clever and intriguing Miss Matilda Wren—who may be able to help him solve the many questions raised by the attack.

In the coastal city Skargakar, residents make a living from hunting dragons and use them for everything from clothing to food, while airborne ships hunt them in the white expanse of a cloud sea, the Cloudmere. Lian does his part carving the kyrillian crystals that power the ships through the Cloudmere, but when he makes an enemy of a dangerous man, Lian ships out on the next vessel available as a drachenjager, or dragon hunter.