Elysium Girls

A lush, dazzlingly original young adult fantasy about an epic clash of witches, gods, and demons. Elysium, Oklahoma, is a town like any other. Respectable. God-fearing. Praying for an end to the Dust Bowl. Until the day the people of Elysium are chosen by two sisters: Life and Death. And the Sisters like to gamble against each other with things like time, and space, and human lives. Elysium is to become the gameboard in a ruthless competition between the goddesses. The Dust Soldiers will return in ten years' time, and if the people of Elysium have not proved themselves worthy, all will be slain. Nearly ten years later, seventeen-year-old Sal Wilkinson is called upon to lead Elysium as it prepares for the end of the game. But then an outsider named Asa arrives at Elysium's gates with nothing more than a sharp smile and a bag of magic tricks, and they trigger a terrible accident that gets both Sal and Asa exiled into the brutal Desert of Dust and Steel. There Sal and Asa stumble upon a gang of girls headed by another exile: a young witch everyone in Elysium believes to be dead. As the apocalypse looms, they must do more than simply tip the scales in Elysium's favor—only by reinventing the rules can they beat Life and Death at their own game in this exciting fantasy debut.

A lush, dazzlingly original young adult fantasy about an epic clash of witches, gods, and demons. Elysium, Oklahoma, is a town like any other. Respectable. God-fearing. Praying for an end to the Dust Bowl. Until the day the people of Elysium are chosen by two sisters: Life and Death. And the Sisters like to gamble against each other with things like time, and space, and human lives. Elysium is to become the gameboard in a ruthless competition between the goddesses. The Dust Soldiers will return in ten years' time, and if the people of Elysium have not proved themselves worthy, all will be slain. Nearly ten years later, seventeen-year-old Sal Wilkinson is called upon to lead Elysium as it prepares for the end of the game. But then an outsider named Asa arrives at Elysium's gates with nothing more than a sharp smile and a bag of magic tricks, and they trigger a terrible accident that gets both Sal and Asa exiled into the brutal Desert of Dust and Steel. There Sal and Asa stumble upon a gang of girls headed by another exile: a young witch everyone in Elysium believes to be dead. As the apocalypse looms, they must do more than simply tip the scales in Elysium's favor—only by reinventing the rules can they beat Life and Death at their own game in this exciting fantasy debut.

A chance meeting in the online game Destruction of Elysium changes the lives of a healer and a tank forever. The digital worlds of MMORPGs are Alex’ only safe space. Online, she’s the great AlexTheDestroyer, leader of one of the biggest raiding guilds in Destruction of Elysium, a max level tank who kicks monster ass and she knows her way around every dungeon. In real life, she’s just Alex, a clumsy girl who’s hyper and too impulsive. Until she meets a healer who seems to be able to heal more than just her online character. Only, Alex can’t fall for her. The guild desperately needs a new healer, or they’ll lose their top rank. Can she risk the fate of the guild just to confess to the one girl who really seems to get her? Fleur is a girly-girl who loves flowers, dresses and being a healer in her favourite MMORPG. But in this online world, like in real life, she feels like she’s only playing a role, never truly herself. That is until she meets a tank who seems to match her play style perfectly. She’s curious but also a little wary. Can she really trust someone she met in a videogame? When Alex and Fleur meet offline at the yearly guild meeting, everything they ever knew starts to shift...

An immortal monster hunter and a royal handmaiden embark on an epic journey to change their fates in this soul-stirring young adult fantasy novel for fans of The Witcher and The Last Unicorn. By night, the Ankou is a legendary, permanently young mercenary—the most fearsome sword for hire in all of the Five Lands, and its most abiding mystery. But when the sun rises, a dark magic leaves him no more than bones. Cursed with this cycle of death and resurrection, the Ankou wants only to find the final rest that has been prophesied for him, no matter the cost. When the kingdom of Kaer-Ise is sacked, Flora, handmaiden to the royal family, is assaulted and left for dead. Wounded, heartbroken, and the sole survivor of the massacre, Flora wants desperately to be reunited with the princess she served and loved. She and the Ankou make a deal: He will help Flora find her princess, and train Flora in combat, in exchange for her aid in breaking his curse. But it isn't easy to kill an immortal, especially when their bond begins to deepen into something more . . . Together, they will solve mysteries, battle monsters, and race against time in this fantasy novel about sacrifice, love, and healing by Elysium Girls author Kate Pentecost.

Like virtually no other photographer, Stefan Soell is a master at capturing extremely explicit erotic images in an astonishingly imaginative and aesthetic way. Often accompanied by a touch of humor and a wink of the eye, his models switch between innocence and excitement, physical attraction and cool distance. This is precisely what pleases men, and fllls the pages of his latest book, with a powerful sexual charge. Where on earth does Soell get these girls? In addition to some of his favorite models, the new volume contains some mainly new and sensationally pretty creatures (25 in all). In the classical mythology of the ancient Greeks, Elysium was a paradise, located between this world and the one to come. While browsing through the book, you do not need to be a Greek hero to get a kick out of these daughters of Elysium.

J.A. Souders's haunting debut—Renegade Since the age of three, sixteen-year-old Evelyn Winters has trained to be Daughter of the People in the underwater utopia known as Elysium. Selected from hundreds of children for her ideal genes, all her life she's believed that everything is perfect. Her world. Her people. The Law. But when Gavin Hunter, a Surface Dweller, accidentally stumbles into Elysium's secluded little world, Evelyn comes to a startling realization: Everything she knows is a lie. Her memories have been altered. Her mind and body aren't under her own control. And the person she knows as Mother is a monster. Together with Gavin she plans her escape, only to learn that her own mind is a ticking time bomb...and Mother has one last secret that will destroy them all. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean is the novel upon which the author's reputation as an important SF writer principally rests. A ground-breaking work both of feminist SF and of world-building hard SF, it concerns the Sharers of Shora, a nation of women on a distant moon in the far future who are pacifists, highly advanced in biological sciences, and who reproduce by parthenogenesis--there are no males--and tells of the conflicts that erupt when a neighboring civilization decides to develop their ocean world, and send in an army. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

When an insect-borne plague begins to envelop the world, three sixteen-year-olds struggle to survive amongst the healthy “trues” and the infected “wickeds” in this gripping dystopian tale from the author of The Winter Place. A plague, called Wickedness, is pulsing through the world; and in its wake, it’s dividing the population into thirds: The WICKED: Already infected by the droves of Singers, the ultraviolet mosquito-like insects who carry the plague, the Wicked roam the world freely. They don’t want for much—only to maim and dismember you. But don’t worry: They always ask politely first. The TRUE: The True live in contained, isolated communities. They’re the lucky ones; they found safety from the Singers. And while the threat of the Wicked may not be eliminated, for the True, the threat has certainly been contained… The VEXED: The Vexed are the truly fortunate ones—they survived the sting of the Singers, leaving them immune. But they’re far from safe. The Vexed hold the key to a cure, and there are those who will do anything to get it. In this brilliantly realized novel, three teens—Astrid, Hank, and Natalie—start to realize that the divisions of their world aren’t as clear as they seem, and are forced to question what being wicked truly means.