The Dark Visitor

Following a mysterious illness that prompted the departure from his movie industry career, a young man is finally able to visit an old university friend for a long awaited, and long sought after, catch-up. Though still unfit, he knows this is the time to listen to his heart and venture out, even in poor health and weather. It promises to be a lively visit, one that will hopefully allow an opening for him to share his new-found faith in Jesus Christ, yet what should have been a standard conversation soon takes a strange and disturbing turn. She reveals her worry regarding a friend who has joined a global movement, one that uses the technique of channeling to communicate with aliens that are planning on visiting planet Earth in the very near future.Alarmed and dismayed at what he hears, the young man instinctively knows this is the perfect opportunity to witness the truth... but something is not quite right. Has someone secretly been watching his steps from the shadows aiming to sabotage the good news?

The Dark Foundations continues the epic story begun in The Shadow and Night. Far beyond the tranquility of the Assembly worlds, Nezhuala, Lord-Emperor of the Dominion, is preparing a merciless and crushing attack on Farholme as a prelude to an onslaught on the Assembly. Back on Farholme, Commander Merral D’Avanos recovers from his wounds after the battle at Fallambet where the intruders were destroyed. Yet even as Merral dreams of a return to peace, he receives a warning of imminent war on a massive scale he cannot ignore. Amid the urgent preparations for battle, Merral and his friends realize the inadequacy of their defenses. Then, with weeks to spare before the predicted eve of war, Merral receives an offer of assistance from the strangest of sources. But can it be trusted? As the wave of war finally crashes over Farholme, Merral must find the answer to other questions in the heat of battle: Can Farholme survive the growing internal strains? Who will pay the price for victory? Will his own weaknesses undo both him and his world?

Why are outsiders not allowed on Vypeen Island after sunset? What brought Richard Baxter from Calcutta to Kochi in 1948? Where did Baxter and his wife disappear on the night of Pournami? Who is the visitor that the fishermen fear so much? How far will one man go for the woman he loves? Six decades later, Shiuli Dutta is mysteriously lured into the dreaded Clifford Mansion, where she encounters the ghost of Richard Baxter. The grieving ghost tells her an incomplete story of its life. A story that will reveal the darker side of a man’s mind. A story that shall unveil a venomous truth of the past. A story so sinsiter that it shall alter the fate of a nation’s future. A story of courage and cowardice, of deceit and insanity. The story of THAT FREQUENT VISITOR

"A COMPLEX, CREEPY, AND INSIDIOUS NOVEL ABOUT AMBITION." --THE GUARDIAN "READERS OF RUTH WARE AND GILLIAN FLYNN WILL LOVE IT." --LIBRARY JOURNAL (STARRED REVIEW) "FASCINATING, BRILLIANT, CREEPY." --GOOD HOUSEKEEPING If you had the perfect life . . . how far would you go to protect it? Professor Olivia Sweetman has worked hard to achieve the life of her dreams, with a high-flying career as a TV presenter and historian, three children, and a talented husband. Only one other person knows that Olivia's perfect life is in fact a desperate tangle of lies: Vivian Tester, the socially awkward, middle-aged housekeeper of a Sussex manor who found the Victorian diary of a pioneering female surgeon on which Olivia's new biography is based. In a gripping narrative that shifts between London, Sussex, and the idyllic South of France, Olivia and Vivian will learn knife-edged truths about themselves and discover just how far each will go to protect her reputation.

The current revival of the work of Maeve Brennan, who died in obscurity in 1993, has won her a reputation as a twentieth–century classic—one of the best Irish writers of stories since Joyce. Now, unexpectedly, Brennan's oeuvre is immeasurably deepened and broadened by a miraculous literary discovery—a short novel written in the mid–1940s, but till now unknown and unpublished. Recently found in a university archive, it is a story of Dublin and of the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally unreachable side of the Irish temper. The Visitor is the haunting tale of Anastasia King, who, at the age of twenty–two, returns to her grandmother's house—the very house where she grew up—after six long years away. She has been in Paris, comforting her disgraced and dying mother, the runaway from a disastrous marriage to Anastasia's late father, the grandmother's only son. "It's a pity she sent for you." the grandmother says, smiling with anger. "And a pity you went after her. It broke your father's heart."Anastasia pays dearly for the choice she made, a choice that now costs her her own strong sense of family and makes her an exile—a visitor—in the place she once called home. Penelope Fitzgerald, writing of Brennan's story "The Springs of Affection," said that it carries an "electric charge of resentment and quiet satisfaction in revenge that chills you right through." The same can be said of the The Visitor, Maeve Brennan's "lost" novel—the early work of an incomparable master.

The settings for a lot of Jerome Johnson stories seem to take place on a gravel side road somewhere. They are absurd, comical, creative and just to the left of surreal.