When The Stars Fall To Earth

This is a novel about people who find themselves in the middle of a horrific conflict and how they survive. Their choices affect their families, the people they love, and the course of their lives. Their stories start before the events in Sudan touch them, following them through challenges and triumphs, as they rebuild their lives. What they have in common with the rest of us is that their journeys are about finding out what kind of people they are: Should they try to draw strength from their anger or should they let it go? Is it better to stick with what you know or find the courage to change?

A “poignant [and] powerful” novel about a 1920s Midwestern community in the aftermath of a devastating tornado (The New Yorker). In March 1925, the worst tornado in the nation’s history will descend without warning on the small town of Marah, Illinois. By nightfall, hundreds will be homeless and hundreds more will lie in the streets, dead or grievously injured. Only one man, Paul Graves, will still have everything he started the day with—his family, his home, and his business, all miraculously intact. This “absolutely gorgeous” novel follows Paul Graves and his young family in the year after the storm as they struggle to comprehend their own fate and that of their devastated town (The New York Times). They watch helplessly as Marah tries to resurrect itself from the ruins and as their friends and neighbors begin to wonder how one family, and only one, could be exempt from terrible misfortune. As the town begins to recover, the family miscalculates the growing resentment and hostility around them with tragic results, in an “extraordinarily moving” portrayal of survivor’s guilt and the frenzy of bereavement following a disaster (Financial Times). “All the big themes are here—chance, fate, loyalty, revenge, guilt, jealousy . . . Inspired by actual events surrounding the 1925 Tri-State tornado, the worst in U.S. history, Southwood’s poignantly penetrating examination of the psychic cost of survival is breathtaking in its depth of understanding.” —Booklist (starred review) “What’s most exciting about Southwood’s debut is her prose, which is reminiscent of Willa Cather’s in its ability to condense the large, ineffable melancholy of the plains into razor-sharp images.” —The Daily Beast

A “persuasive . . . heartfelt and vividly written” call to counter systemic racism and build national solidarity in America (Publishers Weekly). The American Promise enshrined in our Constitution states that all men and women are inherently equal. And yet racism continues to corrode our society. If we cannot overcome it, Theodore Johnson argues, the promise that made America unique on Earth will have died. In When the Stars Begin to Fall, Johnson presents a compelling blueprint for the kind of national solidarity necessary to mitigate racism. Weaving together history, personal memories, and his family’s multi-generational experiences with racism, Johnson posits that solutions can be found in the exceptional citizenship long practiced in Black America. Understanding that racism is a structural crime of the state, he argues that overcoming it requires us to recognize that a color-conscious society—not a color-blind one—is the true fulfillment of the American Promise. Fueled by Johnson’s ultimate faith in the American project, grounded in his family’s longstanding optimism and his own military service, When the Stars Begin to Fall is an urgent call to undertake the process of overcoming what has long seemed intractable.

The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.

Shivya Nath quit her corporate job at age twenty-three to travel the world. She gave up her home and the need for a permanent address, sold most of her possessions and embarked on a nomadic journey that has taken her everywhere from remote Himalayan villages to the Amazon rainforests of Ecuador. Along the way, she lived with an indigenous Mayan community in Guatemala, hiked alone in the Ecuadorian Andes, got mugged in Costa Rica, swam across the border from Costa Rica to Panama, slept under a meteor shower in the cracked salt desert of Gujarat and learnt to conquer her deepest fears. With its vivid descriptions, cinematic landscapes, moving encounters and uplifting adventures, The Shooting Star is a travel memoir that maps not just the world but the human spirit.

Nina is a Lipan girl in our world. She's always felt there was something more out there. She still believes in the old stories. Oli is a cottonmouth kid, from the land of spirits and monsters. Like all cottonmouths, he's been cast from home. He's found a new one on the banks of the bottomless lake. Nina and Oli have no idea the other exists. But a catastrophic event on Earth, and a strange sickness that befalls Oli's best friend, will drive their worlds together in ways they haven't been in centuries. And there are some who will kill to keep them apart. Darcie Little Badger introduced herself to the world with Elatsoe. In A Snake Falls to Earth, she draws on traditional Lipan Apache storytelling structure to weave another unforgettable tale of monsters, magic, and family. It is not to be missed.

Nineteen-year-old Jenny is more content staring at the night sky than joining her friends on a night on the town. She's only known them two months, since classes began for her second year at university, but she's already head over heels with one of her housemates, Dale. Every conversation she's had with Dale has ended with her stuttering out an excuse to escape. Then the first meteor blazes through the night, landing close enough to shake the house. Suddenly, she's the one with all the answers, the one her friends and Dale turn to. Having spent so much time glued to a telescope, they expect her to know what's happening. But Jenny's never seen a meteor big enough to impact, and certainly never the thing that rises from the crater. It's a man who glows with a light so hot, everything in its path is disintegrated. Soon after, the night sky is turned to day, coming alive with hundreds more, all with one mission: rid Earth of that which is killing her. Earth has been watched, and the things watching have decided that the human race's time is up. Too much damage has been done, and they have decided that it's time to let Earth recover, to start again. The only way they see that happening is by wiping out the human race. Jenny knows another way, one that will save both Earth and humanity. But it isn't simply a case of finding the nearest official and explaining everything. No one wants to listen to a nineteen-year-old and her friends. They must take their idea directly to the Stars and somehow convince them to listen. But to get there they first have to survive, and survival comes at a price.

As command module pilot for the Apollo 15 mission to the moon in 1971, Al Worden flew on what is widely regarded as the greatest exploration mission that humans have ever attempted. He spent six days orbiting the moon, including three days completely alone, the most isolated human in existence. During the return from the moon to earth he also conducted the first spacewalk in deep space, becoming the first human ever to see both the entire earth and moon simply by turning his head. The Apollo 15 flight capped an already-impressive career as an astronaut, including important work on the pioneering Apollo 9 and Apollo 12 missions, as well as the perilous flight of Apollo 13. Nine months after his return from the moon, Worden received a phone call telling him he was fired and ordering him out of his office by the end of the week. He refused to leave. What happened in those nine months, from being honored with parades and meetings with world leaders to being unceremoniously fired, has been a source of much speculation for four decades. Worden has never before told the full story around the dramatic events that shook NASA and ended his spaceflight career. Readers will learn them here for the first time, along with the exhilarating account of what it is like to journey to the moon and back. It's an unprecedentedly candid account of what it was like to be an Apollo astronaut, with all its glory but also its pitfalls.