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‘One of British crime writing’s hidden jewels’ Time Out

Megan Harpur had taken the train back from London to tell her husband she was leaving him for another man. By the time Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur discovered her in the station car park in the early hours of the morning, there was nothing anyone could do.

Who had committed this savage killing? And what did Megan’s lover’s secret activities have to do with it? The crime confronts Harpur with the most unnerving case of his career – an investigation into his own wife’s brutal and apparently senseless murder.

Composer and dancer Anna van Tuyl is working on her masterpiece, a work she has titled “The Rose”. Her progress is stymied, however, when her body begins suddenly to change. For no knowable reason, she begins to grow strange protuberances, her body warping more day by day. Desperate to complete her symphony before her life becomes subsumed by these growths, she encounters a painter suffering from the same affliction.
Ruy Jacques is an artist, famed for his works and full of inspiration despite his condition. His wife is a scientist, a woman of logic, working to build the perfect weapon. While Anna at first believes she has found a saviour and kindred spirit in Ruy, she instead finds herself in the middle of a tense battle between art and science, with building jealousy and resentment.
Is the true goal the completion of her work, or the possibility of a cure? Is it better to seek immortality through their art, or a full life through science?

Award-winning author Charles Harness’ lost classic was rediscovered by Michael Moorcock more than a decade after it was first published, and champsioned by him to great acclaim. IT was awarded the Retro-Hugo award in 2004.

This fourth volume of Theodore Sturgeon’s Complete Stories publishes the work of 1946-1948, wen Sturgeon’s early popularity among science fiction readers crystallized into a lasting reputation among a wider group of readers. “Maturity” and “Thunder and Roses” are the best-known of the stories in this period. “It Wasn’t Syzygy” display’s Sturgeon’s interest in psychological themes. “The Professor’s Teddy Bear” is an early prototype of the modern “horror story” as practiced by Clive Baker, Stephen King and many others.


In these years Sturgeon was recovering from the failure of his first marriage and a severe case of “writer’s block”. In March 1947 his luck turned around: a story he had failed to sell earlier won a short story contest sponsored by the prominent British magazine, Argosy, with the then-enormous prize of $1000. Later Sturgeon credited this event for restoring his faith in himself as a writer. The same year “Maturity” and “Thunder and Roses” were received with tremendous enthusiasm by his peers. Ray Bradbury, a few years short of his own success, wrote to Sturgeon in February 1947:


“Ted, I hate you!…MATURITY…is a damned nice story. Your sense of humour, sir, is incredible. I don’t believe you’ve written a bad story yet; I don’t think you ever will. This is not log-rolling, by God; I only speak the truth. I predict you’ll be selling at least six stories a year to Collier’s and The Post before long. You have the touch.” A month later, the day he learned he’d won the contest, Sturgeon wrote to his ex-wife, “It’s more than a thousand dollars. The curse is off with me. My faith in [the story’s] quality and my own is restored, and I don’t think that I shall ever again experience that mystic diffidence and childish astonishment when one of my stories sells or is anthologized. I know now why they do, and I’m proud of it, and I know how to use it.”


This fourth volume also features a major “undiscovered” story, “Wham Bop!”, from an obscure youth magazine in 1947. It may be one of the finest fictional portraits of a 1940s jazz band in American letters.


Additional delicacies awaiting the Sturgeon fan in Thunder and Roses are his first Western Story, “Well Spiced”, and a UFO saga, “The Sky Was Full of Ships”, written in 1947 and set in the Southwest. It could well be the true story of the Roswell incident.

With the land of Everien in chaos as a voracious timeserpent wreaks havoc, Istar and her companions – Taratel, Jaya, and Tarquin the Free – embark on a perilous quest to the lost city of Jai Pendu in order to harness the power of the Sekk and the ancient sorcery of the elusive skyfalcon, in the epic conclusion of the Everien saga.

An instant cult classic upon first publication, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy has earned wide critical acclaim, shocking and captivating a loyal readership among science fiction and women’s literature audiences alike.

Sequel to the enormously popular Native Tongue, The Judas Rosecontinues Elgin’s gripping vision of a frightening, male-dominated world where the women of Earth are virtually enslaved. Once again, this group of women-and the nonviolent yet transformative power of language-is called upon to challenge Earth’s violent, patriarchal order. Their revolutionary tool is Laadan-a secret women’s language created to free them from men’s control and make resistance possible for all women.

In The Judas Rose, the time has come to take Laadan from underground and spread its revolutionary power to women everywhere-in part, through a group of nuns inside the Roman Catholic Church. But when a handful of horrified priests uncover the women’s sabotage they move to stamp it out with an undercover female agent of their own.

Sorrow and trouble and bitterness will bound you and yours and the children of yours…

Some said the dying words of Nial Lynn, murdered by his own son, were a wicked curse. To others, it was a winter’s tale spun by firelight on cold, dark nights. But when Corbet Lynn came to rebuild his family estate, memories of his grandfather’s curse were rekindled by young and old – and rumours filled the heavy air of summer.

In the woods that border Lynn Hall, free-spirited Rois Melior roams wild and barefooted in search of healing herbs. She is as hopelessly unbridled – and unsuited for marriage – as her betrothed sister Laurel is domestic. In Corbet’s pale green eyes, Rois senses a desperate longing. In her restless dreams, mixed with the heady warmth of harvest wine, she hears him beckon. And as autumn gold fades, Rois is consumed with Corbet Lynn, obsessed with his secret past – until, across the frozen countryside and in flight from her own imagination, truth and dreams become inseparable…

‘The gems in this impressive collection have the same power to disconcert as her best novels’ Martin Amis

‘Her worlds have a magic sheen . . . she moulds them into dimensions we can only just sense. She is unique. She is legend’ THE TIMES

North to Orsinia and the boundaries between reality and madness … South to discover Antarctica with nine South American women … West to find an enchanted harp and the borderland between life and death … and onward to all points on and off the compass. Twenty astonishing stories from acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin carry us to worlds of wonder and horror, desire and destiny, enchantment and doom.

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.

Feared by enemies and friends alike, Elric of Melnibone walks a lonely path among the worlds of the multiverse. The destroyer of his own cruel and ancient race, as well as its final ruler, Elric is the bearer of a destiny as dark and cursed as the vampiric sword he carries – the sentient black blade known as Stormbringer.

The soul of Elric’s father is tortured and suffering. To free it, Elric must face the princes of hell, and put all of his trust in one woman – the Rose.

With an introduction by Holly Black, and containing THE REVENGE OF THE ROSE as well as associated short stories, this collection presents Moorcock’s greatest creation in a revised and approved order.

When Karl Rainer Andor came to Berlin for the last time it was sacrifice, not victory, that was uppermost in his mind. He intended to use the plutonium bomb he had elaborately planted to effect the reunification of Germany, but he didn’t expect to survive.

The ‘allied’ powers are concerned as much with scoring off each other as with finding the bomb – or with seducing or frightening Andor into telling them where it is. And eventually they are faced with the impossible task of evacuating the historic capital of Germany.

For a decade Alice Sheldon produced an extraordinary body of work under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr, until her identity was exposed in 1977. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever presents the finest of these stories and contains the Nebula Award-winning ‘ Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death’, Hugo Award-winning novella ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’, ‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’ – winner of both the Hugo and Nebula – and of course the story for which she is best known: ‘The Women Men Don’t See’.

This is a true masterwork – an overview of one of SF true greats at the very height of her powers.

Grand Master Ursula K. LeGuin has been recognised for almost fifty years as one of the most important writers in the SF field – and is likewise feted beyond the confines of the genre. The Wind’s Twelve Quarters was her first collection and it brings together some of finest short fiction, including the Hugo Award-winning ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, the Nebula Award-winning ‘The Day Before the Revolution’, and the Hugo-nominated ‘Winter’s King’, which gave readers their first glimpse of the world later made famous in her Hugo- and Nebula-winning masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness.

Vitus Adamson is falling apart. As a pre-deceased private investigator, he takes the prescription Atroxipine hourly to keep his undead body upright and functioning. Whenever he is injured, he seeks Niko, a bombshell mortician with bedroom eyes and a way with corpses, to piece him back together. Decomposition, however, is the least of his worries when two clients posing his most dangerous job yet appear at his door looking for their lost son.

Vitus is horrified to discover the photo of the couple’s missing son is a picture-perfect reproduction of his long dead son. This leads him to question the events of his tormented past; he must face the possibility that the wife and child he believed he murdered ten years ago in a zombie-fugue have somehow survived . . . or is it just wishful thinking designed to pull him into an elaborate trap?

Vitus Adamson has a second chance at life now that he’s no longer a zombie, but after killing his brother Jamie, Vitus lands in prison on murder charges. Jamie’s death exposes secret government projects so deep in the black they cannot be seen-without Vitus, that is.

Sprung from jail, the government hires Vitus to clean up Jamie’s mess, but tracking down his brother’s homemade monsters gone rogue is easier said than done. A convicted killer safely behind bars may not be so safe after all when it appears he is still committing murder through his victim’s dreams. High on Atroxipine (the drug that once kept him functioning among the living) and lapsing into addiction, Vitus’s grip on reality takes a nasty turn when his own dreams start slipping sideways.

His problems multiply as he deals with his failed friendship with wheelchair-bound officer Geoff Lafferty, his wrecked romance with the town mortician Niko, government agents working for his father, sinister figures lurking in the shadows, and least of all, the complications of learning how to be human again.

‘This is a time machine back to an exuberant era of snappy patter, stakeouts, and double-crosses’ LA TIMES

‘Amazing originality’ NEW YORK TIMES

A suspicious personal ad conceals nefarious intent – and eventually lands in the lap of Perry Mason.

It appears that Marilyn Marlow inherited a small fortune from her mother, who got the sum from her wealthy employer. But now the old man’s relatives are contesting the will, putting Marilyn on shaky ground.
Whoever sways Rose Keeling, the key witness to the signing of the will, is sure to be the victor. Enter the personal ad. Marilyn intends to find Rose a Mr. Right in order to get the goods on her. But when Rose is murdered, Perry Mason sets out to find a gentleman caller who had a date with death …