Him Standing

When a Native carver agrees to produce a spirit mask for a mysterious stranger, he falls under the spell of a dangerous sorcerer from the Dream World.

A middle-aged widow, commuter of Amsterdam goes to Pakistan and weds a gentleman. Soon as the groom arrives into The Netherlands for a family reunion, he shockingly discovers in her a spoilt woman. The man tries to save his bond of marriage but the wronged woman neither wants to be tamed due to aspects of love, nor does she co-operate. Instead, she rather wants her man to close his eyes and to shut up his mouth if ever he wishes to become a legitimate resident in her country. The egoist man doesnt compromise on self-respect of a saintly husband and thus is thrown out into streets quite empty-handed and undocumented. Then he gets afraid of going back to his homeland predicting a social ridiculous. Years passed in such a dreary and stoned life-style that one day the city police arrests him against his unlawful status and surrenders him to the foreign police who when fails to deport, sets him free like a squeezed lemon after he having served a years custodial sentence. The author describes how a few Asian immigrants and their spoiled descendants who once get settled into the Western states . forget about their past of struggling. . trap and bait to their own continent/ country-fellows by showing on them a false fairyland. . and try to demoralize a Western society by using its culture as a shield or weapon to fulfill their own sensual curiosity which seems difficult to meet in their own sender lands. The author also regrets to inflexibility of the constitution and rejects to the old theory nobody is above law. He urges on the law-makers must to defend on humanitarian grounds to those noble outlanders who become illegal by some accident, or by a misfortune befell on them and not by fraud or cheating like do often the professional invaders or regular tress-passers breaking into some countrys barriers. The whole story convincingly draws a picture of human courage and endurance against all odds mixed in shadow of oppression and optimism by giving an entire message never quit. A compulsively true heart saga with a positive energy_ readable, thought-provoking and enjoyable.

Set on a small Ohio farm, this “moving, unusual, and accomplished” multigenerational family saga is a “Norman Rockwell painting gone bad” as it explores grief, motherhood, and coming-of-age in Middle America (Margaret Atwood). Joan Chase’s subtle story of three generations of women negotiating lifetimes of “joy and ruin” deserves its place alongside such achievements as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. The Queen of Persia is not an exotic figure but a fierce Ohio farmwife who presides over a household of daughters and granddaughters. The novel tells their stories through the eyes of the youngest members of the family, four cousins who spend summers on the farm, for them both a life-giving Eden and the source of terrible discoveries about desire and loss. The girls bicker and scrap, they whisper secrets at bedtime, and above all, they observe the kinds of women their mothers are and wonder what kind of women they will become. But always present is the family’s great trauma, the decline and eventual death from cancer of Gram’s daughter Grace. A powerful story about family ties and tensions, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is also a book about place, charting the transformation of the old hardscrabble Midwest into the commercial wilderness of modern America.

The final battle -- the ultimate price. The once beautiful land of Hightspall is being carved up by warring armies led by figures from out of legend. One army is headed by the charismatic brute, Axil Grandys, and the other by Lyf, resurrected sorcerer-king and Axil's ancient nemesis. Only the escaped slave Tali and her unreliable magic stand in their way -- but Tali's gift grows more painful every time she uses it. As the armies converge on the fateful peak of Touchstone, Tali and her ally Rix must find a way to overcome Lyf and prevent Axil from using the Three Spells that will destroy Hightspall forever. Justice is the shattering finale to Ian Irvine's fantasy epic Tainted Realm trilogy.