The Impossible Bird

There is a place—a world—where famine and poverty do not exist. Nor sickness nor misery nor unhappiness of any kind. Is it Heaven? As two brothers are about to discover, it's more like Hell. Michael Glynn is a hotshot director addicted to a there's-no-success-like-excess hedonism. Daniel Glynn is a professor of literature, devoted husband, and doting father with a quietly buttoned-down life. Brothers bound by blood. But brothers waging a private civil war—an emotional feud of lies and deceit and dark secrets buried but not forgotten. But all that is about to change. One day the brothers are visited simultaneously by gun-wielding strangers claiming to be agents of an elite government security agency. Each brother is questioned about the whereabouts of the other. What they want is "the code." The strangers are convinced one of the brothers possesses the code, but they aren't sure which. Having maintained only sporadic contact, Michael and Daniel can be of no assistance. Or so they think. The strangers will not take no for an answer. Their instructions are simple: find your brother or die. But what begins as a cross-country manhunt—brother converging on brother—turns into an odyssey of discovery neither could have imagined. It is a journey that will take them to a world of perfect human happiness. A world purged of suffering. A world without death. A world where a life can be relived and mistakes corrected. Both have been given a second chance. The question is, is a second chance what they really need? For Michael and Daniel the answer to that question will be found by unraveling the mystery of the impossible bird. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Australian Women's Weekly GREAT READ for August 'Prepare to immerse yourself in wonder, childish delight and dark, dark trauma in this unique novel from a new and important Australian literary voice' Australian Women's Weekly ‘Every so often a book comes along that reaffirms the glory and beauty of life. Tabitha Bird has gifted us this wonder’ Cass Moriarty Meet Willa Waters, aged 8 . . . 33 . . . and 93. On one impossible day in 1965, eight-year-old Willa receives a mysterious box containing a jar of water and the instruction: ‘One ocean: plant in the backyard.’ So she does - and somehow creates an extraordinary time slip that allows her to visit her future selves. On one impossible day in 1990, Willa is 33 and a mother-of-two when her childhood self magically appears in her backyard. But she’s also a woman haunted by memories of her dark past – and is on the brink of a decision that will have tragic repercussions . . . On one impossible day in 2050, Willa is a silver-haired, gumboot-loving 93-year-old whose memory is fading fast. Yet she knows there’s something she has to remember, a warning she must give her past selves about a terrible event in 1990. If only she could recall what it was. Can the three Willas come together, to heal their past and save their future, before it’s too late? 'A magical tale of healing . . . it's sure to cast a spell over readers' Mindfood magazine 'A wonderful debut . . . An uplifting story about the power of forgiveness, the ability to heal and the magical idea of being able to travel back in time to fix a broken future.' Good Reading Magazine 'A courageous and magical debut novel that reminds us that while we can’t change events from our past, we do have the power to change the story we tell ourselves about them.' Sally Piper

"In this elegant narrative, celebrated naturalist Ted Floyd guides you through a year of becoming a better birder. Choosing 200 top avian species to teach key lessons, Floyd introduces a new, holistic approach to bird watching and shows how to use the tools of the 21st century to appreciate the natural world we inhabit together whether city, country or suburbs." -- From book jacket.

For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. As Scores demonstrates, his devotion to the task of understanding the central literatures of our era has not slackened. There are jokes in Scores, and curses, and tirades, and apologies, and riffs; but every word of every review, in the end, is about how we understand the stories we tell about the world. Following on from his two previous books of collected reviews (Strokes and Look at the Evidence) this book collects reviews from a wide variety of sources, but mostly from Interzone, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Weekly. Where it has seemed possible to do so without distorting contemporary responses to books, these reviews have been revised, sometimes extensively. 125 review articles, over 200 books reviewed in more than 214,000 words.