Soul Selecta

Fated love? A destiny in the stars? Together for all eternity? It doesn’t work like that. At least not without a lot of blood, sweat, and tears behind the scenes where the Soul Selector spins her magical trickery. It is her job is to identify soul mates as they enter this world and somehow get them to fall in love. Aphrodite and all the other gods need this purest love of all. They feed on it.But soul mates are notoriously difficult to work with, and the Soul Selector has just found a particularly stupid pair.

Greer Landon is a successful art gallery owner. She has created an empire by discovering and developing new artists. When she agrees to visit an art school in Boston, she encounters a woman, Hayden Rowe, whose paintings take her breath away. Greer realizes Hayden is not a student, but lives in a remote wing of the school and the maddeningly frustrating headmaster is her mother. Mesmerized by Hayden and her art, Greer learns the young woman has Asperger syndrome. Hayden awakens something in Greer she didn’t know she was capable of. Having suffered from a profound loneliness for most of her life, Greer develops an overshadowing love and protectiveness toward Hayden. As she learns more about Hayden and her heartbreaking family situation, Greer is amazed at how courageous and brilliant she is. Can there be a future with a woman like this, and will Hayden, who can only put words to her emotions through her paintings, return her feelings?

Numinous Fields has its roots in a phenomenological understanding of perception. It seeks to understand what, beyond the mere sensory data they provide, landscape, nature, and art, both separately and jointly, may mean when we experience them. It focuses on actual or potential experiences of the numinous, or sacred, that such encounters may give rise to. This volume is multi-disciplinary in scope. It examines perceptions of place, space, nature, and art as well as perceptions of place, space, and nature in art. It includes chapters written by art curators, and historians and scholars in the fields of landscape, architecture, cultural geography, religious studies, philosophy, and art. Its chapters examine ideas, objects, and practices from the ancient time of Aboriginal Australians’ Dreaming through to the present. The volume is also multi-cultural in scope and includes chapters focussed on manifestations of the sacred in indigenous culture, in cultures influenced by each of the world’s major religions, and in the secular, contemporary world. Foreword by Jeff Malpas Contributors: Samer Akkach, James Bennett, Veronica della Dora, Alasdair Forbes, Virginia Hooker, Philip Jones, Russell Kelty, Muchammadun,Tracey Lock, Ellen Philpott-Teo, John Powell, Rebekah Pryor, Wendy Shaw.

Is Bob Marley the only third world superstar? How did he achieve this unique status? In this captivating new study of one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century, Jason Toynbee sheds new light on issues such as Marley's contribution as a musician and public intellectual, how he was granted access to the global media system, and what his music means in cultural and political terms. Tracing Marley's life and work from Jamaica to the world stage, Toynbee suggests that we need to understand Marley first and foremost as a 'social author'. Trained in the co-operative yet also highly competitive musical laboratory of downtown Kingston, Marley went on to translate reggae into a successful international style. His crowning achievement was to mix postcolonial anger and hope with Jamaican textures and beats to produce the first world music. However the period since his death has been marked by brutal and intensifying inequality in the capitalist world system. There is an urgent need, then, to reconsider the nature of his legacy. Toynbee does this in the concluding chapters, weighing Marley's impact as advocate of human emancipation against his marginalisation as a 'Natural Mystic' and pretext for disengagement from radical politics.

This book explores the ways in which Western-derived music connects with globalization, hybridity, consumerism and the flow of cultures. Both as local terrain and as global crossroads, cities remain fascinating spaces of cultural contestation and meaning-making via the composing, playing, recording and consumption of popular music.

Georgina, Princess of Wales, has always known her destiny, but she never expected duty to call so soon. When her father dies suddenly, she is called back from her Royal Navy post to assume the crown. While the people acclaim their new Queen, Great Britain’s first openly gay monarch, all George feels is the isolation of her station. Beatrice Elliot’s staunch anti-monarchist views have always been a point of gentle contention with her working class, royalty-loving parents. When Bea—director of a hospice charity—must spend six months working with Queen Georgina, her charity’s new patron, sparks fly and passion blooms. But is love enough to bridge the gap between Bethnal Green and Buckingham Palace?

“I can’t do this. I can’t do any of this without her.”Detective Sanne Jensen (not blonde, not tall, definitely not Scandinavian) and Dr. Meg Fielding (scruffy, scatterbrained, prone to swearing at patients) are lifelong best friends, sharing the same deprived background and occasionally the same bed.When a violent kidnapping stuns the Peak District village of Rowlee, both women become involved in the case. As Sanne and her colleagues in East Derbyshire Special Ops search for the culprit, and Meg fights to keep his victim alive, a shocking discovery turns the investigation on its head. With the clock ticking, Sanne and Meg find themselves pushed closer by a crime that threatens to tear everything apart.

Andrea Finley is the flight director for NASA’s latest space flight—to the moon. The mission is the first with a woman in charge, and Andrea will stop at nothing to ensure this is a textbook perfect mission. Her personal life is virtually nonexistent, and she has devoted her entire life to this, the pinnacle of her career. When the mission runs into serious trouble, Andrea has no choice but to call Kenner Hutchings, a brilliant twenty-something whiz kid from MIT with a reputation for living life fast and loose. Kenner is their last chance to save the lives of the seven astronauts entrusted into Andrea’s care. Andrea doesn’t trust Kenner to get the job done, and Kenner takes it as a challenge to break the reserve of her new boss. Can two strong-willed, powerful women overcome their differences to save the lives of seven others and begin a life they never imagined together?