Search Results for: childhood

Kandri Hinjuman was never meant to be a soldier. His brother Mektu was never meant for this world. Rivals since childhood, they are drafted into a horrific war led by a madwoman-Prophet, and survive each day only by hiding their disbelief. Kandri is good at blending in, but Mektu is hopeless: impulsive, erratic-and certain that a demon is stalking him. Is this madness or a second sense? Either way, Kandri knows that Mektu’s antics will land them both in early graves.

But all bets are off when the brothers’ simmering feud explodes into violence, and holy blood is spilled. Kandri and Mektu are taken for contract killers and must flee for their lives-to the one place where they can hope to disappear: the sprawling desert known as the Land that Eats Men. In this eerie wilderness, the terrain is as deadly as the monsters, ghouls, and traffickers in human flesh. Here the brothers find strange allies: an aging warlord, a desert nomad searching for her family, a lethal child-soldier still in her teens. They also find themselves in possession of a secret that could bring peace to the continent of Urrath. Or unthinkable carnage.

On their heels are the Prophet’s death squads. Ahead lie warring armies, sandstorms, evil spirits and the deeper evil of human greed. But hope beckons as well-if the “Master Assassins” can expose the lie that has made them the world’s most wanted men.

A millennium from now, global warming has gone into retreat as the Sun’s dynamics convulse. The great ice returns, driving humankind back to its primitive origins. Here, bands of brutal warriors wage war in the bitter cold. Xaraf Firebridge, powerful young son of a barbarian chieftain, enrages his sire by adopting the pacifistic doctrine of an outland mystic, Darkbloom. Before he can break his vow and slay his father, he is drawn into a temporal wormline and flung a further million years into the Earth of the Failing Sun.

Clever and determined, Xaraf wanders landscapes haunted by prospects of doom and overseen by a trio of godlike Powers. Since childhood he has dreamed of a beautiful young woman. His fate, he sees, is to rescue her from captivity–and perhaps save the whole world, now moved into the outer solar system and lit by a string of tiny orbiting suns.

He has yet to meet his true foe, the dragon whose history stands opposed to humankind’s. But which will prove to be this world’s mythic Galahad?

The City Imperishable’s secret master and heir to the long-vacant throne has vanished from a locked room, as politics have turned deadly in a bid to revive the city’s long-vanished empire. The city’s dwarfs, stunted from spending their childhoods in confining boxes, are restive. Bijaz the Dwarf, leader of the Sewn faction among the dwarfs, fights their persecution. Jason the Factor, friend and apprentice to the missing master, works to maintain stability in the absence of a guiding hand. Imago of Lockwood struggles to revive the office of Lord Mayor in a bid to turn the City Imperishable away from the path of destruction. These three must contend with one another as they race to resolve the threats to the city.

His name was Jose Gasparilla, and he was the self-proclaimed King of Pirates. He terrorized the waters around Florida, demanding tribute from every merchant ship he encountered. Riches flowed into his tiny island kingdom . . . and yet he longed for a life he could never have, for he had left his beloved Isabel behind in Spain. One day he would return to claim her for his bride, he knew, and she had vowed to wait for him.

When he captures a ship and discovers Isabel and her elderly husband aboard, he strikes a deal with the man who stole his bride. For Jose Gasparilla, it means a chance to regain the lost years of his life . . . to live his childhood again and pick a new path, in the Land Without Shadows…

This classic of Gothic horror follows Laura, a woman haunted by a girlhood dream of a beautiful visitor to her bedroom. Now, a decade later, Laura finds Carmilla, who appears to be her own age, on the side of the road after a carriage accident. The two recognize each other from the same childhood dream and become fast friends. Soon after, Laura begins to experience mysterious feelings and is once again haunted by nightmares. She finds Carmilla strangely irresistible and longs to be with her.

But as the two friends grow closer, Laura’s health begins to fail. It becomes apparent that her enchanting companion is harboring a sinister secret. To free herself from Carmilla’s grasp, Laura and her family must fight for their lives.

A science fiction thriller from the author of THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH.

‘A fine engrossing novel by a master!’ Philadelphia Enquirer

In a time when America’s power has been eroded by energy depletion, and world control has been virtually given over to the Chinese, only one man has the courage to seek new mineral resources among the stars. He is Ben Belson, one of the richest men in the world, a man haunted by the memory of a loveless childhood and driven by needs and desires he can barely understand or control. His dream is to find the means to help America break the stranglehold of the corrupt interests who are keeping it a second class power.

Occupation of Earth is now in its 27th year, and relations between humanity and the dictatorial Hefn have never seemed shakier. The aliens mission is to save the planet from its human abusers; and the Baby Ban imposed by mass hypnosis has made Earth a cleaner, wilder, less crowded place. But the Ban has now lasted so long, and provoked such hatred, that when a spark is struck the situation explodes into worldwide riots on one side and retaliatory mindwipings on the other. Years of effort by the eco-spiritual Gaians, who mediate between humans and Hefn, have been destroyed.

While the Gaians regroup and brainstorm frantically in an atmosphere of doubt and danger, one obsessed Hefn and one young woman begin a radical experiment. Pam Pruitt has discovered a growing ability to acquire information by non-rational means. Childhood suffering has empowered her, in a way once understood by hunting and gathering peoples – an understanding lost with that lost lifeway – to communicate with mysterious forces through strong dreaming: to function as a shaman on behalf of her community, the human race.

When bookstore owner Sylvia Lynn returns to her childhood home in upstate New York, she meets the Fiber Guild – a group of local women who meet to knit, embroider, and sew – and learns why her grandmother watches her so closely. A primitive power exists in the forest, a force the Fiber Guild seeks to bind in its stitches and weavings. And Sylvia is no stranger to the woods…

Kyreol’s small world begins at the Face, a high rock cliff, and ends at Fourteen Falls, a series of rapids. Each year, her people celebrate Moon-Flash-a spark of light that seems to come from and go into the moon, a symbol of life and joy. When a mysterious stranger arrives, Kyreol wants to know more about him, as well as the Moon-Flash, and soon she and her childhood friend Terje leave their home to look for answers. Those answers will pluck Kyreol from Riverworld and transform her life forever-by fast-forwarding her into a future she can barely comprehend.

Keill Randor, at the plateau of years between childhood and manhood, faces the Ordeal. As a symbol of the hardships and struggles to come in the years ahead, the Ordeal requires him to travel, unarmed and unequipped, through som eof the roughest terrain on the harsh planet of Moros. He has to pass this test to enter advanced training with the Young Legionaries.

Keill has been told that, during the two-day Ordeal, he will face the most deadly danger known to Legionaries – but what form it will take he cannot guess. Throughout the trek, Keill encounters vicious, merciless creatures of that wild region, But he learns – through the Ordeal and his subsequent training as a Young Legionary – that deadly dangers can come from within himself as from without.

A childhood haven becomes a house of death.

‘Rinehart’s literary distinction lies in the combination of love, humour and murder that she wove into her tales … She helped the mystery story grow up’ New York Times


Sunset House has been Marcia’s summer home for her entire life. Both of her parents died there, and she and her brother spent their youth exploring its rambling hallways and seaside grounds.

They love the old house, but Marcia’s sister-in-law has never taken to it. Juliette loathes the sea, and soon comes to loathe her husband, filing for divorce – and demanding alimony that could only be paid by the sale of Sunset House. A few days later Juliette disappears. And a week after that, her body is discovered.

Marcia must work quickly to keep her beloved childhood home from being forever spoiled. Whilst somewhere in Sunset House a murderer plans the next move…

Detective Constable Henry Campion turns lone avenger when his childhood friend and colleague DC Fred Jordan is shot dead by a gangster who is spared the death sentence. And Campion is convinced there were two killers. To try to catch the second, Campion goes undercover as a spiv in a King’s Cross nightclub, the Full Moon.

But Campion’s adventures at the Full Moon draw him deeper into gangland, and closer to the woman of his dreams – his dead friend’s widow . . .

But is it love, or is Anne Jordan using Campion for her own ends?

Joe Gores collects here fourteen stories spanning the five decades of his varied writing career. In the title story, two bright young scientists set out to prove there is no good-dispensing God by demonstrating that there is no evil-dispensing Satan – with unforeseen results.

Sneaking onto an anti-terrorism course for law enforcement officers produced ‘Watch For It’, featuring an urban terrorist who is clever, manipulative and without pity. A childhood spent around the Mississippi marshes informs ‘Quit Screaming’, putting a Miami mobster into a midnight swamp where he buried a man he murdered.

‘Sleep the Big Sleep’ sees a nerdy dreamer finally get his chance, inspired by a photo taken of the author for the cover of a crime magazine. And ‘Goodbye, Pops’, which won an Edgar Award, is based on a story written by the author while at college, on the death of his beloved grandfather.

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

Twenty years ago the five-year-old Traxler heir was kidnapped from his Hollywood home and never seen again. Now his widowed mother is overjoyed when a plausible young man claims to be her long-lost son, a claim supported by accurate childhood memories. Mrs Traxler accepts him unconditionally, and when her niece Charlotte dares to question him, she is cut out of the will.

Charlotte turns to Jesse Falkenstein, who is soon as suspicious of the man’s claim as she is. After launching an intense investigation, one lead after another falls flat – and even the original kidnapper refuses to talk . . .

A remote, crumbling house; four sisters; and the secrets that imprison them…

‘Before Gillian Flynn, there was Lesley Glaister’ Harper’s Bazaar

‘Frightening yet eerily beautiful … Lesley Glaister is adept, original and mature’ Hilary Mantel

In a remote, crumbling house in the Fens live four sisters – Agatha, Milly, and Ellen and Esther – identical twins so closely linked as to be almost one person. They have lived there all their lives, trapped still by the fear of their dead father, who governs his daughters’ lives from beyond the grave. And then there is George, another inhabitant, imprisoned in the cellar.

Little by little, macabre events come to light: events that transform an idyllic country childhood into a world of eccentric isolation.

‘Eerie and satisfying – a horror story told with tenderness’ Sunday Times

The ‘Decayed Gentlewoman’, Colin and Ginny had called her as children – a disregarded painting badly in need of cleaning, which later vanished.

But the ‘Decayed Gentlewoman’ re-entered their grown-up lives with a bang. The manner of its reappearance sparked a train of suspicion about the true nature of past events. And now Dr Colin Locke, with his childhood emotions vividly reawakened, finds himself drawn into a maze of theft, legal complexities and murder.

‘A fine craftsman’ Ellery Queen

The man in the yellow robe had put the ancient curse of the Nine Times Nine on Wolfe Harrigan. And when Matt Duncan looked up from the croquet lawn that afternoon, he saw the man in the yellow robe in Wolfe Harrigan’s study.

When Matt got there, all the doors and windows were locked from the inside. But when the door was broken down, there was no man in a yellow robe in the room, and Wolfe Harrigan lay murdered on the floor. But at the time of the murder the man in the yellow robe was nowhere near the room.

Who better to explain this miracle than Sister Ursula, a nun, whose childhood ambition was to become a policewoman?

Classic police procedural by a ‘born storyteller’ (Sunday Times), who combined natural flair with his experience in the police to truly authentic effect.

Hell is a City is the first of Maurice Procter’s Inspector Martineau series and was made into taut, fast-paced film in 1959 by Hammer Studios, set against the grimy back streets and rain-streaked bright lights of Manchester.

When hardened criminal Don Starling escapes from jail, killing a prison guard in the process, Inspector Philip Martineau knows he will stop at nothing to make good his escape. The two men have known each other since childhood, and Starling blames Martineau for his incarceration a decade earlier. As the story hurtles to its conclusion, the two men meet in a final, violent confrontation.

In the late 1930’s as the threat of war is building in Germany, twelve year old Julia arrives to spend the summer with her famous playwright father, only to find herself alone with Trudl, her Austrian stepmother. With Trudl preoccupied by the plight of her fellow countrymen in Europe, Julia retreats into the scary Gothic novels left behind by her older siblings, and becomes haunted by dreams of Joshua Harken, the notorious alchemist who built the 17th century house, and then disappeared, accused of murder. Even after she joins forces with local boy Tim Bellyap to investigate the stories of Joshua’s ghost, she is afraid to tell anybody about the terrifying voices coming unbidden from somewhere inside her chest…

In a compelling exploration of loneliness and adolescent insecurities, peopled by ghosts from the old house, this is the powerful story of Julia’s awakening from her nightmare world.

Also published as Voices, and set in Joan Aiken’s own supposedly haunted childhood home, Jeake’s House in Rye, Sussex, this Y.A. ghost story draws on some of her own childhood memories to create an unusual thriller.

“When reduced to its essence, Julia’s story may not be so very different from that of Aiken’s Wolves Chronicles heroine Dido Twite: each girl must cope with a distant, unreliable father and learn to survive in a world peopled with self-absorbed adults. It is the exploration of these issues, even more than the fine storytelling, which makes this novel so compelling” Publisher’s Weekly
“Joan Aiken is the godsend to children who are at the age when they read as if there were no tomorrow” Washington Post

“An entertaining read, for readers who like to read suspenseful ghost stories with a hint of real menace. The ghostly elements of this story are nicely mirrored by the historical menace of the times, as Julia ruminates on the dangers of Hitler, whom she sees as a sort of spider, spreading his web out over Europe” Goodreads reviewer

For millennia, the alien union called the Weave had been at war with the Amplitur. But only in the handful of centuries since Earth had joined the Weave had the tide of the battle been slowly turning in the Weave’s favour. Then an elite unit, raised from childhood in dedication to the Amplitur Purpose and designed to match perfectly the Humans they were to fight, came of age – and it looked as if at last the Amplitur might prevail against the Weave.


But when one of the elite unit, a warrior called Ranji, was captured by the Weave, a horrible truth was revealed: Ranji was in fact Human, a subject of the Amplitur’s vile genetic manipulations.

The Weave promised to reverse the effects and help Ranji rescue other altered Humans from the clutches of the Amplitur. But neither Ranji nor his new allies could have know that the proposed cure would result in an abomination that could tear the Weave alliance apart – and brand Ranji and his kind as the most despicable creatures in the galaxy…

Adapted by Fritz Leiber from the motion picture produced by Banner Productions, Inc., here is a Tarzan with the values of courage, loyalty and honour learned from the beloved of his wild African childhood, brought to full power by the education, intelligence and strength of his ancient Greystoke lineage.

Harry Blakey remembered a childhood secret – that there was a room under his folks’ home which crossed into another world. When, finally as a war veteran, he came back to the old house, he investigated – and found his memory was true.

There were indeed other Earths and other civilisations and adventures to be had – at great risks.

For when he enlisted in the special commando corps organised to stop the interdimensional warfare, he came up against the terrifying hordes of the Diamond Contessa. She had looted many Earths and her hunger was always increasing. No mere human heroics would wrest the keys of the world away from her – not white her army of monsters held a dozen civilisations in thrall!

Love, history or blood…which is the strongest?

In childhood something black settled on Mechail Korhlen and drank from his throat. And later somebody pitied him enough to kill his poor deformed body when he became an adult. But then Mechail chose to return from beyond the veil to enact revenge – and to follow Anjelen, ruler of the sinister monastery sited deep in the forest.

The fulfilment of his destiny had begun.

Several years ago, Christian Huxley’s father, George, obsessively documented the strange phenomena emanating from Ryhope Wood at the edge of their property. He watched the ancient heroes emerge, shouting both incomprehensible warnings and unmistakable invitations. Recklessly, George followed them inot the mysterious sylvan shadows that changed him forever.
Christian himself was not untouched by these living dreams. A childhood encounter with a phantom from another time draws him to the Wood as an adult. Deep in Ryhope, Christian uncovers the lie that permeates his worst nightmares. And like his father, he will be consumed with the mythagoes of Ryhope, especially a young Celtic warrior called Guiwenneth. She is the key to the mystery of the universe, an ancient heroine caught in a timeless tale of bravery and sacrifice.
Now, together with a band of crusaders from a world long gone, Christian and Guiwenneth become part of the unfolding stories both remembered and forgotten. They meet sorcerers in battle and giants who can travel miles in one step. And they discover the meaning of the two gates, Ivory and Horn – one the lie, the other the truth.