The Year Of Our War

The most exciting, original and important new fantasy novel to be published since China Miéville's PERDIDO STREET STATION. A breathtakingly skilful debut. A superb work of literary fantasy. In a truly original imagined world of breathtaking, sometimes surreal beauty, fifty utterly alien but disarmingly human immortals lead mankind in a centuries-long war. Jant is the Messenger, one of the Circle, a cadre of fifty immortals who serve the Emperor. He is the only immortal - indeed the only man alive - who can fly. The Emperor must protect mankind from the hordes of giant Insects who have plagued the land for centuries, eating everything and everyone in their path. But he must also contend with the rivalries and petty squabblings of his chosen immortals. These will will soon spill over into civil war. Steph Swainston has written an astonishingly original literary fantasy. She writes beautifully. Her novel places her in a tradition of writing typified by Mervyn Peake, M. John Harrison and China Miéville. This is a breathtaking debut novel of the finest quality.

The most exciting, original and important new fantasy novel to be published since China Miéville's PERDIDO STREET STATION. A breathtakingly skilful debut. A superb work of literary fantasy. In a truly original imagined world of breathtaking, sometimes surreal beauty, fifty utterly alien but disarmingly human immortals lead mankind in a centuries-long war. Jant is the Messenger, one of the Circle, a cadre of fifty immortals who serve the Emperor. He is the only immortal - indeed the only man alive - who can fly. The Emperor must protect mankind from the hordes of giant Insects who have plagued the land for centuries, eating everything and everyone in their path. But he must also contend with the rivalries and petty squabblings of his chosen immortals. These will will soon spill over into civil war. Steph Swainston has written an astonishingly original literary fantasy. She writes beautifully. Her novel places her in a tradition of writing typified by Mervyn Peake, M. John Harrison and China Miéville. This is a breathtaking debut novel of the finest quality.

For most of the world, the sixth of June, 1944, was D-day, but for 15-year-old Sharon Grossberg of Brooklyn it was "Death Day," the date her mother died of leukemia. The novel chronicles the last year of World War II as lived by people like Sharon, worried by the fate of her father who is serving overseas and by news of the Jewish holocaust.

This is a modern day civil war novel with NO political blame. After years of questioning the reality of what has been happening in this nation, I have come to the conclusion that when war happens it will be because of WE THE PEOPLE. There is so much division being pushed today by our political leaders and Hollywood elites that the country is starting to break. Make no mistake about it, the divide they are pushing CAN BE avoided if WE THE PEOPLE would stop for even a moment to realize how brainwashed they are hoping we will become. This story is based on a twenty year long nightmare that I have had. The book is told in the first person, think of it in the terms of a dairy of a man on the ground when it all goes wrong.

This riveting, beautifully produced graphic memoir tells the story of the early years of the Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Marco, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French wife. The book opens in America, where the boy’s father works for the South Vietnam embassy; there the boy is made to feel self-conscious about his otherness thanks to schoolmates who play war games against the so-called “Commies.” The family is called back to Saigon in 1961, where the father becomes Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem’s personal interpreter; as the growing conflict between North and South intensifies, so does turmoil within Marco’s family, as his mother struggles to grapple with bipolar disorder. Visually powerful and emotionally potent, Such a Lovely Little War is both a large-scale and intimate study of the Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of the Vietnamese: a turbulent national history interwined with an equally traumatic familial one. Marcelino Truong is an illustrator, painter, and author. Born the son of a Vietnamese diplomat in 1957 in the Philippines, he and his family moved to America (where his father worked for the embassy) and then to Vietnam at the outset of the war. He earned degrees in law at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, and English literature at the Sorbonne. He lives in Paris, France.

Two brothers -- Chuck and Tom Hagel -- who went to war in Vietnam, fought in the same unit, and saved each other's life. They disagreed about the war, but they fought it together. 1968. America was divided. Flag-draped caskets came home by the thousands. Riots ravaged our cities. Assassins shot our political leaders. Black fought white, young fought old, fathers fought sons. And it was the year that two brothers from Nebraska went to war. In Vietnam, Chuck and Tom Hagel served side by side in the same rifle platoon. Together they fought in the Mekong Delta, battled snipers in Saigon, chased the enemy through the jungle, and each saved the other's life under fire. But when their one-year tour was over, these two brothers came home side-by-side but no longer in step -- one supporting the war, the other hating it. Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and his brother Tom epitomized the best, and withstood the worst, of the most tumultuous, shocking, and consequential year in the last half-century. Following the brothers' paths from the prairie heartland through a war on the far side of the world and back to a divided America, Our Year of War tells the story of two brothers at war -- a gritty, poignant, and resonant story of a family and a nation divided yet still united.

Unique among his fellow immortals and mortal folk alike, Jant Comet can fly. His talent is a gift and a curse that has earned him a place in the Castle Circle as Messenger to the Emperor San -- soaring high and free above the bloody battlefields of his world, carrying word back to his master of progress and regress in the ever-escalating conflict between man and the awful armies of giant, flesh-devouring insects. But while Jant's duty is to remain neutral in the petty squabbles and power plays of the fifty who will neither age nor die naturally, bitter rivalries that have festered for centuries now threaten to incite a savage civil war. And Jant may be the only being alive capable of stemming the onrushing tide of destruction and the unstoppable insect infestation. For only he can gain entrance -- through extreme doses of the narcotic that owns his soul -- into a place of darkest wonders and revelations; a strange and horrific alternate reality that none but Jant Comet believes exists. A literary triumph of the first water -- bold, stylish, and breathtakingly original -- Steph Swainston's The Year of Our War ascends like a rocket to the upper reaches of the imagination and loudly heralds the arrival of a true modern master of the fantastic.