Blood Sisters

During their childhood years in the Kenya Highlands of the 1950s, three girls from vastly different backgrounds become blood sisters, promising that nothing will ever destroy the bond between them. But as they grow up love rivalries, broken promises and the tensions and violence of a newly independent Kenya threaten to tear their childhood dreams apart.

Three little girls. One accident. A lifetime of lies. From the bestselling author of The Dead Ex. Three little girls set off to school one sunny morning. Within an hour, one of them is dead. Fifteen years later, Kitty can't speak and has no memory of the accident that's to blame. She lives in an institution, unlikely ever to leave. But that doesn't keep her from being frightened when she encounters an eerily familiar face. Art teacher Alison looks fine on the surface. But the surface is a lie. She's struggling to make ends meet and to forget the past. When a teaching job at a prison opens up, she takes it, despite her fears. Maybe this is her chance to set things right. Then she starts to receive alarming notes; next, her classroom erupts in violence. Meanwhile, someone is watching both Kitty and Alison. Someone who never forgot what happened that day. Someone who wants revenge. And only another life will do. . .

To contemporaries, the Wars of the Roses were known collectively as a “cousins' war.” The series of dynastic conflicts that tore apart the ruling Plantagenet family in fifteenth-century England was truly a domestic drama, as fraught and intimate as any family feud before or since. As acclaimed historian Sarah Gristwood reveals in Blood Sisters, while the events of this turbulent time are usually described in terms of the male leads who fought and died seeking the throne, a handful of powerful women would prove just as decisive as their kinfolks' clashing armies. These mothers, wives, and daughters were locked in a web of loyalty and betrayal that would ultimately change the course of English history. In a captivating, multigenerational narrative, Gristwood traces the rise and rule of the seven most critical women in the wars: from Marguerite of Anjou, wife of the Lancastrian Henry VI, who steered the kingdom in her insane husband's stead; to Cecily Neville, matriarch of the rival Yorkist clan, whose son Edward IV murdered his own brother to maintain power; to Margaret Beaufort, who gave up her own claim to the throne in favor of her son, a man who would become the first of a new line of Tudor kings. A richly drawn, absorbing epic, Blood Sisters is a tale of hopeful births alongside bloody deaths, of romance as well as brutal pragmatism. It is a story of how women, and the power that women could wield, helped to end the Wars of the Roses, paving the way for the Tudor age—and the creation of modern England.

Blood Sisters tells the story of Jeong Yeoul, a young Korean college student in the 1980's, when the memory of President Chun Doohwan's violent suppression of student demonstrations against martial law was still fresh. Yideum captures with raw honesty the sense of dread felt by many Korean women during this time as Jeong struggles in a swirl of misguided desires and hopelessness against a society distorted by competing ideologies, sexual violence, and cultural conservatism. Facing this helplessness, her impulse is to escape into the world of art. Blood Sisters is a vivid, powerful portrayal of a woman’s efforts to live an authentic life in the face of injustice.

The voices of the women who witnessed the French Revolution are finally restored to history. Yalom focuses on the most unforgettable chronicles: the governess of the royal children; the servant attending Marie-Antoinette in her last days; Robespierre's sister, Charlotte; and others bound together by a common nightmare.

A tantalizing selection of stories from some of the best female authors who’ve helped define the modern vampire. Bram Stoker was hardly the first author—male or female—to fictionalize the folkloric vampire, but he defined the modern iconic vampire when Dracula appeared in 1897. Since then, many have reinterpreted the ever-versatile vampire over and over again—and female writers have played vital roles in proving that the vampire, as well as our perpetual fascination with it, is truly immortal. These authors have devised some of the most fascinating, popular, and entertaining of our many vampiric variations: suavely sensual . . . fascinating but fatal . . . sexy and smart . . . undead but prone to detection . . . tormented or terrifying . . . amusing or amoral . . . doomed or deadly . . . badass and beautiful . . . cutting-edge or classic . . . Blood Sisters collects a wide range of fantastical stories from New York Times bestsellers Holly Black, Nancy Holder, Catherynne M. Valente, and Carrie Vaughn, and critically acclaimed writers Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Tanith Lee, all of whom have left their indelible and unique stamps on the vampire genre. Whether they are undeniably heroes and heroines or bloodthirsty monsters (or something in between), the undead are a lively lot. This anthology offers some of the best short fiction ever written by the “blood sisters” who know them best: stories you can really sink your teeth into.

A visceral and compelling mystery about a Cherokee archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who is summoned to rural Oklahoma to investigate the disappearance of two women…one of them her sister. There are secrets in the land. As an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her days in Rhode Island trying to protect the land's indigenous past, even as she’s escaping her own. While Syd is dedicated to her job, she’s haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma hometown fifteen years ago. Though she swore she’d never go back, the past comes calling. When a skull is found near the crime scene of her youth, just as her sister, Emma Lou, vanishes, Syd knows she must return home. She refuses to let her sister's disappearance, or the remains, go ignored—as so often happens in cases of missing Native women. But not everyone is glad to have Syd home, and she can feel the crosshairs on her. Still, the deeper Syd digs, the more she uncovers about a string of missing indigenous women cases going back decades. To save her sister, she must expose a darkness in the town that no one wants to face—not even Syd. The truth will be unearthed.

Two young girls, Barbara McKay and Susan Chapman, come from broken homes and broken dreams. Where chaos and despair is the rule and love the exception and their only escape is each other. Together they cling to life in a fantasy of heroes and heroines in a small California coast town. In the land of Surf, Sand and Sun, they are best friends on their own and causing trouble wherever they can. Precocious and street wise, nothing scares them in a town filled with tourists ripe for the picking, tanned and muscled surfers to flirt with, big blue waves to ride and all the frozen chocolate bananas you can eat. It's 1966, a time of youthful rebellion and exciting new discoveries. Happy in their make-believe world, the girls suddenly discover a dark chasm and fall into a nightmare from which there is no escape. Frank Roberts, a demented killer, shatters their world, as he stalks them, killing their friends along the way. Brad Lewis, a mysterious stranger who becomes their friend, holds a secret that could either save their lives or destroy them all. In the middle of all the murder and deception the girls are faced with the reality that they are on their own and will never survive unless they find the killer first. It's time to go on the offensive. The special bond between them, their deep sense of loyalty and their faith in one another could be crucial to their survival.