When The World Was Steady A Novel

A PEN/Faulkner Award finalist about two sisters’ divergent paths, from the author of The Burning Girl and The Emperor’s Children. In this highly acclaimed novel, life isn’t all Emmy and Virginia Simpson anticipated. When Emmy’s marriage ends, she flees her home in Sydney to “find herself” on the island of Bali—only to become embroiled with a crew of international misfits and smugglers. Her prim and pious sister Virginia, meanwhile, has never wandered far outside of London. Struggling to find meaning, Virginia follows her aging mother’s advice to vacation on the Isle of Skye. On these two islands halfway around the world, the middle-aged sisters confront the costs of self-knowledge and their destinies with unexpected consequences.

Emmy Simpson believes she makes her own luck. After an austere wartime childhood in London, she joyfully grasped at her first sign of good fortune and left for Australia. Her sister Virginia doesn’t believe in luck at all. She made no more than a brief foray to the other side of the city. The sisters made their choices, made steady worlds for themselves. But now, middle-aged, they find these worlds disintegrating. ‘In its rich detail and its humour, this is a wry, uplifting book’ Independent on Sunday ‘Messud writes beautiful cadenced prose, and proceeds, sentence by sentence, image by image, character by character, to create a fully realized, multi-layered world . . . [she] has the imagination, the craft and the understanding of human nature to write about anything she chooses’ Chicago Tribune ‘This is a fine first novel, and the “first” is deceptive, for its author has the daring and assurance to take on Iris Murdoch-like questions about goodness and truth’ New Yorker

An impossible quest. An epic love story. A mesmerizing debut. In 1924, the English mountaineer Ashley Walsingham dies attempting to summit Mount Everest, leaving his fortune to his long-lost lover, Imogen Soames-Andersson—whom he has not seen in seven years. Ashley’s attorneys search in vain for Imogen, but the estate remains unclaimed. Nearly eighty years later, new information leads the same law firm to Tristan Campbell, a young American who could be the estate’s rightful heir. If Tristan can prove he is Imogen’s descendant, the inheritance will be his. But with only weeks before Ashley’s trust expires, Tristan must hurry to find the evidence he needs. From London WWI archives to the battlefields in France to the fjords of Iceland, Tristan races to piece together the story behind the unclaimed riches: a reckless love affair pursued only days before Ashley’s deployment to the Western Front of the Great War; a desperate trench battle fought by soldiers whose hope is survival rather than victory; an expedition to the uncharted heights of the world’s tallest mountain. Following a trail of evidence that stretches to the far edge of Europe, Tristan becomes consumed by Ashley and Imogen’s story. But as he draws close to the truth, Tristan realizes he may be seeking something more than an unclaimed fortune. The Steady Running of the Hour announces the arrival of a stunningly talented author. Justin Go’s “debut is ambitious in many ways…it depicts a love that transcends time and disdains convention; and it fluidly moves between past and present” (Publishers Weekly).

Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay is about a singer-songwriter named Rudy Pauver, his conflicted relationship with a successful former protege, and a young niece who wants to travel with him and whose surprise appearance forces a reckoning with himself and his past. This illuminating anti-hero story propels the characters through time, story, and philosophical discourse with sharp asides, short stories, dialogues, and monologues. A musician's book for the punk scene insider, with so many truths that "punks" (whatever) have had to reconcile or deny, that it's like holding up a mirror and seeing something beautiful and ugly. Engrossing and compelling, the novel wrestles with the "punk ethos" and features a punk/rock-inflected inside look at life on the road: magical, honest, and pure, but also destructive, dangerous, and out of control. The author, a writer and musician best known for playing the accordion and piano in The World/Inferno Friendship Society and keyboards in The Hold Steady, was once named #1 of the top ten accordionists in punk rock. He is also the author of the travel book The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar (a New York Times "Season's Best Travel Books" pick) and is a lecturer in writing about music at UC Berkeley.

A “mesmerizing” novel of a family falling apart by the New York Times bestselling author of The Burning Girl. Set in colonial Algeria, the south of France, and New England, and narrated by a fifteen-year-old girl with a ruthless regard for the truth, The Last Life is the tale of the LaBasse family, whose quiet integrity is shattered by the shots from a grandfather’s rifle. As their world suddenly begins to crumble, long-hidden shame emerges: a son abandoned by the family before he was even born, a mother whose identity is not what she has claimed, and a father whose act of defiance brings Hotel Bellevue—the family business—to its knees. From the PEN/Faulkner Award-nominated author of The Emperor’s Children, named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, this novel skillfully reveals how the stories we tell ourselves, and the lies to which we cling, can turn on us in a moment. “[A] tour de force . . . every step feels stunningly sure.” —Vogue

Told with urgency, intimacy, and piercing emotion, this New York Times bestselling novel is the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed, and abandoned by a desire for a world beyond her own. Nora Eldridge is a reliable, but unremarkable, friend and neighbor, always on the fringe of other people’s achievements. But the arrival of the Shahid family—dashing Skandar, a Lebanese scholar, glamorous Sirena, an Italian artist, and their son, Reza—draws her into a complex and exciting new world. Nora’s happiness pushes her beyond her boundaries, until Sirena’s careless ambition leads to a shattering betrayal. A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • A Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year • A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book • A Huffington Post Best Book • A Boston GlobeBest Book of the Year • A Kirkus Best Fiction Book • A Goodreads Best Book

Enjoy this meticulously edited SF Collection, jam-packed with space adventures, dystopian apocalyptic tales and the greatest sci-fi classics: H. G. Wells: The Time Machine The War of the Worlds The Island of Doctor Moreau The Invisible Man… Jules Verne: Journey to the Center of the Earth 20.000 Leagues under the Sea The Mysterious Island… Mary Shelley: Frankenstein The Last Man Edgar Wallace: Planetoid 127 The Green Rust… Otis Adelbert Kline: The Venus Trilogy The Mars Series Malcolm Jameson: Captain Bullard Series Garrett P. Serviss: Edison's Conquest of Mars A Columbus of Space The Sky Pirate… Arthur Conan Doyle: The Professor Challenger Series Francis Bacon: New Atlantis Edwin A. Abbott: Flatland Jack London: Iron Heel The Scarlet Plague The Star Rover… Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde George MacDonald: Lilith H. Rider Haggard: King Solomon's Mines She William H. Hodgson: The House on the Borderland The Night Land… Edgar Allan Poe: Some Words with a Mummy Mellonta Tauta… H. P. Lovecraft: Beyond the Wall of Sleep The Cats of Ulthar Celephaïs Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward: 2000–1887 Equality… Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Owen Gregory: Meccania the Super-State Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels William Morris: News from Nowhere Samuel Butler: Erewhon Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race James Fenimore Cooper: The Monikins Hugh Benson: Lord of the World Fred M. White: The Doom of London Ignatius Donnelly: Caesar's Column Ernest Bramah: The Secret of the League Arthur D. Vinton: Looking Further Backward Robert Cromie: The Crack of Doom Anthony Trollope: The Fixed Period Cleveland Moffett: The Conquest of America Richard Jefferies: After London Francis Stevens: The Heads of Cerberus Percy Greg: Across the Zodiac David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus Stanley G. Weinbaum: Stories from the Solar System Edward Everett Hale: The Brick Moon Abraham Merritt: The Moon Pool The Metal Monster… C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne: The Lost Continent Lewis Grassic Gibbon: Three Go Back

This carefully edited collection has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was a prolific English writer of fiction works, history and politics. Wells is called a father of science fiction. Table of Contents: A Modern Utopia Ann Veronica Bealby In the Days of the Comet The Chronic Argonauts The First Men in the Moon The Invisible Man The Island of Dr Moreau The New Machiavelli The Passionate Friends The Prophetic Trilogy The Research Magnificent The Sea Lady The Secret Places of the Heart The Soul of a Bishop The Time Machine The Undying Fire The War in the Air The War of the Worlds The World Set Free Tono-bungay When the Sleeper Wakes Collections of Short Stories Short Stories: A Catastrophe A Deal in Ostriches A Dream of Armageddon A Slip Under the Microscope A Story of the Days to Come A Story of the Stone Age A Tale of the Twentieth Century A Talk with Gryllotalpa How Gabriel Became Thompson How Pingwill Was Routed In the Abyss Le Mari Terrible Miss Winchelsea's Heart Mr. Brisher's Treasure Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation Mr. Marshall's Doppelganger Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland My First Aeroplane Our Little Neighbour Perfect Gentleman on Wheels Pollock and the Porroh Man The Empire of the Ants The Flying Man The Grisly Folk The Inexperienced Ghost The Land Ironclads The Lord of the Dynamos The Loyalty of Esau Common The Magic Shop The Man Who Could Work Miracles The Man with a Nose The Moth The New Accelerator The New Faust The Obliterated Man The Pearl of Love The Presence by the Fire The Purple Pileus The Rajah's Treasure The Reconciliation The Red Room The Sea Raiders The Star The Stolen Body The Story of the Last Trump The Story of the Stone Age The Temptation of Harringay The Thing in No. 7...