Child Of Light

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The electrifying first novel of an all-new fantasy series from the legendary author behind the Shannara saga, about a human girl struggling to find her place in a magical world she’s never known “Enticing . . . Brooks’s fans will be thrilled to have a new series to savor.”—Publishers Weekly At nineteen, Auris Afton Grieg has led an . . . unusual life. Since the age of fourteen, she has been trapped in a Goblin prison. Why? She does not know. She has no memories of her past beyond the vaguest of impressions. All she knows is that she is about to age out of the children’s prison, and rumors say that the adult version is far, far worse. So she and some friends stage a desperate escape into the surrounding wastelands. And it is here that Auris’s journey of discovery begins, for she is rescued by a handsome yet alien stranger. Harrow claims to be Fae—a member of a magical race that Auris had thought to be no more than legend. Odder still, he seems to think that she is Fae as well, although the two look nothing alike. But strangest of all, when he brings her to his wondrous homeland, she begins to suspect that he is right. Yet how could a woman who looks entirely Human be a magical being herself? Told with a fresh, energetic voice, this fantasy puzzle box is Terry Brooks as you have never seen him before, as one young woman slowly unlocks truths about herself and her world—and, in doing so, begins to heal both.

Follows the lives of three friends, Solomon Freund, a Jew, Erich Wiesser, his Catholic neighbor and "brother in blood", and Miriam Rathenau, whom both boys love, and who happens to be niece of Germany's foreign minister Walther Rathenau. From their youth helping at their parents' co-owned tobacco shop, the boys find their relationship strained, as was all of Germany, by the growth of the National Socialist party and the descent of Germany into a Nazi hell.

The story of Saint Lucia, with tips and recipes for celebrating Lucia Day.

Detective Simon Reynolds has his work cut out for him. He's been called upon to investigate the murder of a young woman who was found dead in her bathtub. To make matters worse, she was also brutally mutilated – clearly the work of a demented killer. In the throes of marital strife and haunted by memories of his own childhood, Simon launches an investigation into the murder, receiving unexpected aid from a nosy, blind female reporter who is just as determined as he is to find the woman's killer.

The first and definitive biography of one of the great American novelists of the postwar era, the author of Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise, and a penetrating critic of American power, innocence, and corruption Robert Stone (1937-2015), probably the only postwar American writer to draw favorable comparisons to Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, and Joseph Conrad, lived a life rich in adventure, achievement, and inner turmoil. He grew up rough on the streets of New York, the son of a mentally troubled single mother. After his Navy service in the fifties, which brought him to such locales as pre-Castro Havana, the Suez Crisis, and Antarctica, he studied writing at Stanford, where he met Ken Kesey and became a core member of the gang of Merry Pranksters. The publication of his superb New Orleans novel, Hall of Mirrors (1967), initiated a succession of dark-humored novels that investigated the American experience in Vietnam (Dog Soldiers, 1974, which won the National Book Award), Central America (A Flag for Sunrise, 1981), and Jerusalem on the eve of the millennium (Damascus Gate, 1998). An acclaimed novelist himself, Madison Smartt Bell was a close friend and longtime admirer of Robert Stone. His authorized and deeply researched biography is both intimate and objective, a rich and unsparing portrait of a complicated, charismatic, and haunted man and a sympathetic reading of his work that will help to secure Stone's place in the pantheon of major American writers.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, first published in 1944, is considered one of the most profound and relevant works by the influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and certainly the fullest statement of his political philosophy. Written and first read during the prolonged, tragic world war between totalitarian and democratic forces, Niebuhr’s book took up the timely question of how democracy as a political system could best be defended. Most proponents of democracy, Niebuhr claimed, were “children of light,” who had optimistic but naïve ideas about how society could be rid of evil and governed by enlightened reason. They needed, he believed, to absorb some of the wisdom and strength of the “children of darkness,” whose ruthless cynicism and corrupt, anti-democratic politics should otherwise be repudiated. He argued for a prudent, liberal understanding of human society that took the measure of every group’s self-interest and was chastened by a realistic understanding of the limits of power. It is in the foreword to this book that he wrote, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” This edition includes a new introduction by the theologian and Niebuhr scholar Gary Dorrien in which he elucidates the work’s significance and places it firmly into the arc of Niebuhr’s career.