fiction

Under the blazing sun, an elite troupe of dancers are trained to harness their magic. They are the queen?s most formidable assassins. Aasira has one of the rarest talents ? for she is a flame-wielder. Feared by all and envied by some, she uses her power to execute enemies of the crown. Aasira?s greatest wish is to serve her queen. But on the eve of her graduation, with tensions rising among the dancers and secrets stirring in the shifting sand dunes, she begins to question whether she was truly born to kill...

This book is a collection of eleven interconnected short stories from the Dominican diaspora. It is a book centered on one extended family - the Bele?ns - across multiple generations. It is set in the fictional small town of Hidalpa - and Santo Domingo and Paterson and San Juan and Washington Heights, too. It is told in a style both utterly real and distinctly magical - and its stories explore machismo, mental health, family, and identity.

In The Falls of the Wyona by David Brendan Hopes, four friends growing up on the banks of a wild Appalachian river just after WWII discover, almost at the same time, the dangerous, alluring Falls and the perils of their own maturing hearts. Seen through the eyes of his best friend Arden, football hero Vince falls in love with the new kid, Glen. They have no context for their feelings, and the next few years of high school become a tense, though sometimes funny, artifice of concealment. The winner of Red Hen?s Quill Prize, The Falls of the Wyona is the first of three achieved (and several more projected) novels by this author imbued with the magical atmosphere of Appalachian culture.

"Winning the chance to resurrect her ex-best friend Annie LeBlanc from the dead for 30 days, Wilson Moss, ecstatic to have her back, discovers a loophole that may mean Annie can stay for good, but the only person who can help is someone who hates them both"--Provided by publisher.

Lyla is in a bit of a rut. Her post-doctoral research has fizzled out, she?s pretty sure they won?t extend her contract, and things with her boyfriend, Nico, an aspiring actor, aren?t going great. When the opportunity arises for Nico to join the cast of a new reality TV show, One Perfect Couple, she decides to try out with him. A whirlwind audition process later, Lyla find herself whisked off to a tropical paradise with Nico, boating through the Indian Ocean towards Ever After Island, where the two of them will compete against four other couples?Bayer and Angel, Dan and Santana, Joel and Romi, and Conor and Zana?in order to win a cash prize. But not long after they arrive on the deserted island, things start to go wrong. After the first challenge leaves everyone rattled and angry, an overnight storm takes matters from bad to worse. Cut off from the mainland by miles of ocean, deprived of their phones, and unable to contact the crew that brought them there, the group must band together for survival. As tensions run high and fresh water runs low, Lyla finds that this game show is all too real?and the stakes are life or death.

The Fountainhead is an unprecedented phenomenon in modern literature. Arguably the century's most challenging novel of ideas, The Fountainhead is the story of a gifted young architect, his violent battle with conventional standards, and his explosive love affair with the beautiful woman who struggles to defeat him. In his fight for success, he first discovers, then rejects, the seductive power of fame and money, finding that in the end, creative genius must triumph. His battle against mediocrity gives a gripping new dimension to the concept of evil.

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he'll be switched off, and they'll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty. The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad - very mad.

It doesn't take long for ambitious freshman and aspiring engineer Jessie Ahuja to learn about two university legends. One is the haunted history of Davidson Tower, where more than fifty years ago, two ill-fated lovers disappeared in a devastating fire. The other is Ravi Kumar, a privileged billionaire nepo baby who's aggravatingly charming and occupying more brain space than Jessie has room for. Things change when a campus prank locks them both in the old tower's ghostly library. There, Jessie finds letters from the fabled lost lovers, forgotten in a hollowed-out copy of Persuasion. One by one, the letters suck Jessie and Ravi into a beguiling mystery and an achingly beautiful long-ago romance destined to go up in flames. It's also drawing Jessie and Ravi--every bit as star-crossed--closer together. Can they overcome whatever fate has in store for them? Or are they just as doomed as the young lovers whose tragic end has become legend?.

Told in diary format, 14-year-old Franny journals about the year when she moves to Japan to be with her father and all the adventures she has learning a new culture, fitting in at a new school, and navigating feelings for more than one boy.

Things are getting tense at home for Nicky and Kenny as they wait for a visit from their estranged mother. To escape, they go for a walk on the moors, taking their little Jack Russell terrier with them. But what should have been a laugh, a lark, turns deadly when the weather changes and they are caught in a blizzard. Nothing will ever be quite the same again.