Men Of Stone

In Gayle Friesen's powerful novel, 15-year-old Ben can't make sense of his life. He lives in a house full of women, yet he can't talk to girls. He tries to be a jock, but can't even make the co-ed volleyball team. And ridicule from the guys has driven Ben to give up the one thing at which he truly excels -- dance. Now, he's being bullied by a thug named Claude, who's found out about Ben's ballet classes. Ben feels his anger and frustration grow with each passing day. Then Great-Aunt Frieda comes to visit and Ben learns about the old woman's life in Russia. He's surprised at how Frieda dealt with the Men of Stone -- Stalin's agents who terrorized her community and family. As Frieda tells her powerful story, Ben begins to understand who he is and what kind of person he wants to be. But first he must get past the rage that has taken control of his life.

Could she ever prove her innocence? After her father's death, Sara Rodney thought she'd finally be safe at her grandmother's country home outside London. That was before she was forced to marry Luke Gallagher, almost a total stranger.

THE #1 AMAZON HORROR BESTSELLER! "THE STONE MAN is a novel that intrigues, enthralls, horrifies, thrills, and hits the reader with an emotional resonance as only the best stories can."-Ain't It Cool News Nobody knew where it came from. Nobody knew why it came. Even so, for two-bit (and antisocial) reporter Andy Pointer, the appearance in his city of a man made of moving stone meant the scoop of a lifetime. He would soon learn that The Stone Man was much more - and much worse - than that. This is Andy's account of everything that came afterwards, and the people that were lost along the way; of the terrible price that he, and the rest of his country, had to pay.The destruction. The visions. The dying. PRAISE FOR 'THE STONE MAN': "Once again believable characters and a mind blowing story, and when Luke Smitherd is recognised as the great writer he is he is bound to be compared to the likes of James Herbert and Stephen King."-Scrooby1, Amazon UK Review "Tremendous. I was looking for something completely original and different, this nailed it spot on. Highly recommended."-Neil Novita, Amazon USA Review "I have owned a Kindle for about 2 years and downloaded some excellent books for very little cost but Luke Smitherd's works beat the lot"-Silversmith, Amazon UK Review "This ebook was fantastic and totally different from any other sci-fi thriller I've ever read...I kept thinking 'What if...what if...'-Carl Law, Amazon US Review "It was one of those books where you tell yourself you will read just one more page, then look at the clock and realise that it's 2 hours later , I would thoroughly recommend it"-Elaine Hosegood, Amazon UK Review "As soon as I started reading I was completely sucked in, which very rarely happens for me. I couldn't wait to get home and read it each night. I laughed. I cried. I did actual real life gasps of horror."-Katie, Amazon UK Review "Fantastically written characters who make you care about them right from the off, an unfathomable villain who defies all understanding and a supporting cast that flesh out the story beautifully."-Andy Pettifer, Goodreads Review "I spend a lot of time trawling through the kindle book store looking for cheap books, relying on reviews to make my purchases. I have come across some less than average books using this method, but also some real gems. This book definitely falls into the latter category. It had me gripped from page one right through to the Alternative Ending Synopsis at the end. The other reviews leave me little to say other than thanks Luke."-Steve Sut, Amazon UK Review "So good the first thing I did after I put it down was to download his other two books."-Miss H. L. Smith, Amazon UK Review "This book starts with a bang and doesn't let up. I read this in two sittings. Recommended."-Dickydavis, Goodreads review "A very enjoyable read and cracking value at the price.Do not be put off by Science Fiction or Horror in the title if they are not your bag, this is an inteligent and thought provoking read. Highly recommended."-Dave Osborn, Amazon UK Review "I literally found this hard to stop reading,I wanted to know the answers.I have been around a good while so have read all of Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury etc. and I would genuinely put this author in the same class as these class acts."-K Murphy, Amazon UK Review "...so my 5-star review? That's five stars in comparison to REAL books; not just the stuff you'll find self-published on Kindle. The Stone Man is the sort of book that, if I'd splashed ten quid on in an airport or train station, bookstore, I'd have considered it money well-spent." Militant Ginger, Amazon USA Review A full-length novel. 140,000 words. FROM THE AUTHOR OF 'THE PHYSICS OF THE DEAD' AND 'THE BLACK ROOM' SERIES, ALSO AVAILABLE ON THE KINDLE STORE.

Evoking the narrative sweep of "The Clan of the Cave Bear" and the spiritual resonance of "The Celestine Prophecy", Lambert creates an extraordinary debut novel of prehistoric life. The story of three wise women--each called Zena, yet born thousands of generations apart--who live by the ways of love and compassion, and explore the evolution of the human body, mind, and soul.

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

Paul Prescot’s desire to catalogue and comprehend the aboriginal rock paintings of the Canadian Shield is told through the eyes of the woman he loves, and who, for her own reasons, accompanies him on his travels to the deep north. Her journeys with her husband, and then alone, returning to the north shore of Lake Superior to commend his ashes to the water, draw her deeper into a history that, while foreign to them both, seems to offer a meaningful alternative to a world that has gone wrong. Peter Unwin turns his unique talents to a story that lies at the heart of this country and to the crucial issue of our times. Written in Stone maps the exhilarating and ultimately tragic consequences of one man’s commitment to the land of his birth, a land whose deep and unwritten past is outside the reach of his understanding. Written in Stone goes beyond the surface acknowledgments of settler impacts, and exists on the border of two solitudes, where the known and unknown cannot be separated, where mythology and reality are one, and where an old and inaccessible knowledge holds the means to a possible reconciliation.

The acclaimed chronicle of the discovery of the legendary lost civilization of the Maya. Includes the history of the major Maya sites, including Palenque, Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Tuloom, Copan, and more. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Illustrated with a map and more than 100 images. In 1839, rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world’s most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood—both already celebrated for their adventures in Egypt, the Holy Land, Greece, and Rome—sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would upend the West’s understanding of human history. In the tradition of Lost City of Z and In the Kingdom of Ice, former San Francisco Chronicle journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist William Carlsen reveals the remarkable story of the discovery of the ancient Maya. Enduring disease, war, and the torments of nature and terrain, Stephens and Catherwood meticulously uncovered and documented the remains of an astonishing civilization that had flourished in the Americas at the same time as classic Greece and Rome—and had been its rival in art, architecture, and power. Their masterful book about the experience, written by Stephens and illustrated by Catherwood, became a sensation, hailed by Edgar Allan Poe as “perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published” and recognized today as the birth of American archaeology. Most important, Stephens and Catherwood were the first to grasp the significance of the Maya remains, understanding that their antiquity and sophistication overturned the West’s assumptions about the development of civilization. By the time of the flowering of classical Greece (400 b.c.), the Maya were already constructing pyramids and temples around central plazas. Within a few hundred years the structures took on a monumental scale that required millions of man-hours of labor, and technical and organizational expertise. Over the next millennium, dozens of city-states evolved, each governed by powerful lords, some with populations larger than any city in Europe at the time, and connected by road-like causeways of crushed stone. The Maya developed a cohesive, unified cosmology, an array of common gods, a creation story, and a shared artistic and architectural vision. They created stucco and stone monuments and bas reliefs, sculpting figures and hieroglyphs with refined artistic skill. At their peak, an estimated ten million people occupied the Maya’s heartland on the Yucatan Peninsula, a region where only half a million now live. And yet by the time the Spanish reached the “New World,” the Maya had all but disappeared; they would remain a mystery for the next three hundred years. Today, the tables are turned: the Maya are justly famous, if sometimes misunderstood, while Stephens and Catherwood have been nearly forgotten. Based on Carlsen’s rigorous research and his own 1,500-mile journey throughout the Yucatan and Central America, Jungle of Stone is equally a thrilling adventure narrative and a revelatory work of history that corrects our understanding of Stephens, Catherwood, and the Maya themselves.

Merciless. Murderer. Monster. He has been called many names in his time. Built for war and nothing else, he has witnessed every shade of violence humans know, and he has wrought his own masterpieces with their colours. He cared once, perhaps, but far too long ago. He is bound to his task, dead to the chaos he wreaks for his masters. Now, he has a new master to serve and a new war to endure. In the far reaches of the Realm, Hartlund tears itself in two over coin and crown. This time he will fight for a boy king and a general bent on victory. Beneath it all he longs for change. For something to surprise him. For an end to this cycle of warfare. Every fighter has a last fight. Even one made of stone.