Willow King

Originally published by Random House in 1998.

Thanks to the faith and hard work of Katie Durham, Willow King no longer has badly twisted legs. After painstaking training, the colt has gained the strength to compete in major races-and Katie is determined to prove he's a champion. Unfortunately, her new ambition presents her with the most nerve-racking challenge of her life: earning a jockey's license and riding Willow King in the Kentucky Derby. This inspiring story, a sequel to the author's award-winning first novel, is based on her real experiences as a jockey, groom, and assistant horse trainer.

One of NPR’s 50 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of the Decade: A fifteenth-century palace mapmaker must hide his powers in the time of the Inquisition . . . Award-winning author G. Willow Wilson’s debut novel Alif the Unseen was an NPR and Washington Post Best Book of the Year and established her as a vital American Muslim literary voice. Now she delivers The Bird King, an epic journey set during the reign of the last sultan in the Iberian peninsula at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. Fatima is a concubine in the royal court of Granada, the last emirate of Muslim Spain. Her dearest friend, Hassan, the palace mapmaker and the one man who doesn’t leer at her with desire, has a secret—he can draw maps of places he’s never seen and bend the shape of reality. When representatives of the newly formed Spanish monarchy arrive to negotiate the sultan’s surrender, Fatima befriends one of the women, not realizing that she will see Hassan’s gift as sorcery and a threat to Christian Spanish rule. With their freedoms at stake, what will Fatima risk to save Hassan and escape the palace walls? As the two traverse Spain with the help of a clever jinn to find safety, The Bird King asks us to consider what love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate. “Wilson has a deft hand with myth and with magic, and the kind of smart, honest writing mind that knits together and bridges cultures and people.” —Neil Gaiman, author of Norse Mythology “A triumph . . . one of the best fantasy writers working today.” —BookPage “A treasure-house of a novel, thrilling, tender, funny, and achingly gorgeous. I loved it.” —Lev Grossman, author of the Magicians trilogy

Katie makes a sacrifice to save the life of a disabled racing colt—but will it all be in vain? At Willow Run Thoroughbred Farm, horses are born and bred for racing. When a much-anticipated bay colt endowed with the farm’s finest racing blood is born with terribly twisted legs, the obvious choice is to put him down. He’d be lucky if he could stand and nurse, let alone race. But thirteen-year-old Katie can’t stand the idea. Born with one of her legs almost an inch shorter than the other, she wonders what would have happened if her parents had felt the same way about her. What if they had given up on her entirely when they realized she couldn’t be a prima ballerina? Desperate to save the colt’s life, Katie works out a deal with the farm’s owner and becomes the proud owner of Willow King. Can she help him overcome the odds and claim his place as the racehorse royalty he was born to be?

A deeply engrossing, philosophical novel by a rising Estonian literary star. Wrapped into his long coat against the incessant rain and accompanied by a strange parrot, the young Dutch student Laurentius arrives in Estonia on an icy day at the end of the seventeenth century. On the run from a dark past and suspected of heresy, he has fled to Tartu, 'The City of the Muses', to study at the famous university. Laurentius has been searching obsessively for a cure for the mysterious melancholy which torments him, and is desperate to understand where the soul comes from, and how it relates to the body. But the more he searches, the more he is attracted to the world of instinct, superstition and magic of the peasants in the surrounding countryside. A world which he knew as a child, but which now persecutes him in dreams and visions which increasingly blur with reality. In this astonishingly atmospheric novel, Friedenthal enters the bowels of Shakespeare's century to tell the story of anguished modernity, and of the advent of the Age of Enlightenment - while medicine is still progressing on the lines of humours, fears and alchemy, and the dark North dreams of radient antiquity, of symposia in Mediterranean gardens among the sweet hum of the bees - the birds of the muses, the souls of poets.

The world was formless and gray, forever shrouded in fog. Then came the First Flame – which ushered in the Age of Fire, bringing with it life and death, good and evil, and the Hollows, lost creatures who faded into undeath as they slowly lost their humanity. Whenever the Flame fades, and darkness threatens to overtake the world, it is the duty of the mighty Lords of Cinder to link the Flame and keep the light of life burning. Many Lords of Cinder have come and gone, starting the cycle of life and death once more. Now, one of the Lords of Cinder refuses his duty, and the task falls to a lowly band of Hollows to usher in a new age…