In The Valley Of The Sun

A finalist for the 2017 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Deftly written and utterly addictive, this Western literary horror debut will find a home with fans of authors like Joe Hill, Cormac McCarthy, and Anne Rice. One night in 1980, a man becomes a monster. Haunted by his past, Travis Stillwell spends his nights searching out women in West Texas honky-tonks. What he does with them doesn’t make him proud, just quiets the demons for a little while. But after Travis crosses paths one night with a mysterious pale-skinned girl, he wakes weak and bloodied in his cabover camper the next morning—with no sign of a girl, no memory of the night before. Annabelle Gaskin spies the camper parked behind her motel and offers the cowboy a few odd jobs to pay his board. Travis takes her up on the offer, if only to buy time, to lay low and heal. By day, he mends the old motel, insinuating himself into the lives of Annabelle and her ten-year-old son. By night, in the cave of his camper, he fights an unspeakable hunger. Before long, Annabelle and her boy come to realize that this strange cowboy is not what he seems. Half a state away, a grizzled Texas Ranger is hunting Travis for his past misdeeds, but what he finds will lead him to a revelation far more monstrous. A man of the law, he’ll have to decide how far into the darkness he’ll go for the sake of justice. When these lives converge on a dusty autumn night, an old evil will find new life—and new blood.

Cattlemen ride alone across the open range under the deadly aim of roving desperadoes. . . . Gamblers stake their fortunes and their lives on a deck of cards. . . . Strong-willed señoritas seek independence through an enticing combination of beauty, audacity, and spirit. . . . Lawmen and outlaws walk the same dusty streets and speak a common language: Colt, Winchester, Smith & Wesson. Gritty, tough, and unflinchingly authentic, here is the West as it really was: a land where for every friend there is an enemy, for every handshake a fist, for every dispute a resolution—usually in an explosive showdown of blood and bullets. In these remarkable tales, Louis L’Amour—like the very heroes he depicts—blazes a trail across the American frontier and takes us on an unforgettable journey into the heart of our western heritage.

John Lee Johnson in the Valley of the Sun is part of a series pitting John Lee Johnson, the powerfully strong and talented gunman against his nemesis, former Brigadier-General Frank McGrew, a very wealthy steel and railroad magnate. Their enmity goes back to the Civil War (just recently ended.) McGrew has hired private assassins; has sent waves of gunman. He even lured the big Texan into a pit fight with the meanest man alive. When Johnson defeated the toughest man in Chihuahua in a wild and exciting slugfest, McGrew conceived the plan to entice Johnson to return to Chihuahua, Mexico to brace the fastest gunman known on the planet for $100,000 in Mexican gold. The location is the Valley of the Sun...a desolate place of death. Beneath a cruel, inexorable sun constantly shining on nauseating yellow sand---surrounded by stark mountains that form a horseshoe shape valley lay the ruins of both a Christian mission and a sacrificial Aztec altar from centuries past. The hauntingly beautiful Marilla Urmacher, once an enemy to John Lee Johnson, but now a faithful ally comes to his rescue. She sends California's best gunfighter to run interference for the man she secretly loves, John Lee Johnson. The struggles on the journey and the list of strange characters that John Lee Johnson encounters make this an excellent read. It is a classic story of good versus bad. The reader may wonder if good will really win in the end. This western is different. It is not just a melodrama. It pits the money and influence of a wealthy man against the strongest and most singular man in Texas. Their struggles against each other influences so many other singular individuals that are caught up in this eventual death struggle.

Profiles each city and major neighborhood in the Phoenix, Arizona area for prospective home buyers, with information on real estate and house prices, schools, shopping, dining, and more.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE GLOBE AND MAIL, THE GUARDIAN, ESQUIRE, VOGUE, TIME, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE TIMES (UK), VULTURE, THE ECONOMIST, NPR, AND BOOKRIOT ON PRESIDENT OBAMA’S SUMMER 2021 READING LIST The magnificent new novel from Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro--author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day. “The Sun always has ways to reach us.” From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER ONE OF CBC'S BEST CANADIAN NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2022 For fans of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, the riveting story of the unsolved disappearance of an American backpacker in India—one of at least two dozen tourists who have met a similar fate in the remote and storied Parvati Valley. For centuries, India has enthralled Westerners looking for an exotic getaway, a brief immersion in yoga and meditation, or, in rare cases, a true pilgrimage to find spiritual revelation. Justin Alexander Shetler, an inveterate traveler trained in wilderness survival, was one such seeker. In his early thirties, Justin quit his job at a tech startup and set out on a global journey—across the United States by motorcycle, then down to South America, and on to the Philippines, Thailand, and Nepal—in search of authentic experiences and meaningful encounters while documenting his travels on Instagram. His enigmatic character and magnetic personality gained him a devoted following who lived vicariously through his adventures. But the ever-restless explorer was driven to seek out ever-greater extremes, and greater risks, in what had become a personal quest—his own hero’s journey. In 2016, he made his way to the Parvati Valley, a remote and rugged corner of the Indian Himalayas steeped in mystical tradition and shrouded in darkness and danger. There he spent weeks studying under the guidance of a sadhu, an Indian holy man, living and meditating in a cave. At the end of August, accompanied by the sadhu, he set off on a spiritual journey to a holy lake—one from which he would never return. Lost in the Valley of Death is about one man’s search to find himself, in a country where, for many Westerners, the path to spiritual enlightenment can prove fraught, even treacherous. But it is also a story about all of us and the ways, sometimes extreme, we seek fulfillment in life.

The author invites readers to witness the exploration on religion that he undertook after being diagnosed with an aggressive, and likely fatal, form of cancer.