Search Results for: beauty

In the Well-Built City, Master Drachton Below’s power is absolute, and he will not hesitate to use it. His primary method of control is through his physiognomists, who are trained to read a person’s face and body, perceiving that person’s past and secrets-and even events yet to come. These seers are the judges and jury. Now Drachton has found something that could extend his reign for eternity: a fruit that bestows immortality. To investigate its whereabouts, Below sends cold, collected physiognomist Cley to the remote mining town of Anamasobia. One at a time Cley interrogates the townspeople, performing his usual fact finding without issue. That is, until he meets the beautiful and bright Arla, who harbors a secret that could potentially turn Cley’s world upside down-and topple the Well-Built City itself.

A Kafkaesque journey into the unknown, The Physiognomy is an award-winning trip through a land where the line between reality and imagination is constantly blurred.

Charlatans or Prophets? At best, the tiny Kandarian Air Fleet would fight until its last ship was blown into infinity. At worst, it would be annihilated without a chance. To young Captain Bors, either course was unthinkable.

The ruthless Dictator of Mekin had already subjugated twenty-two helpless planets. Now he wanted Kandar’s unconditional surrender, or his vastly superior forces would blast it out of existence.

It took a lot of guts, and the hope that is frequently born of despair, for a military man like Bors to throw in his lot with Talents, Incorporated, an untried, unscientific organization. Through peculiar gifts of extra-sensory perception, its personnel could, their leader insisted, out-think and out-guess even the most deadly dictator in the history of mankind. Could it? It just might.

And it just might not. . . . But there was absolutely nothing to lose, and a free world (and a beautiful girl) to win. Captain Bors made his decision, and the loaded die was cast!

Trillions were hard, bright, tiny things which suddenly arrived – millions and millions and millions of them – one windy day in a village called Harbourtown.

No one could explain them, much less why they had suddenly arrived. Were they a blessing, as their beauty suggested, or a deadly, inexplicable threat? A boy with a microscope was just as likely to come up with the answer as all the acknowledged experts in any known kind of science, so somehow it seemed natural for two ‘ordinary’ boys, Scott and Bem, to join forces with an ex-spaceman against the frightening efforts of the ruthless General Harman to destroy the Trillions, no matter what the cost.

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?

A COMIC SCIENCE FICTION MASTERPIECE!
In the spirit of Monty Python, Arthur Schopenhauer and Douglas Adams, Striped Holes is science fiction with a sense of humor.
Sopwith Hammil might be the nation’s top chat-show host but his peace of mind is shattered when a time traveling bureaucrat lands on his couch. To save his life and the human race (They’re turning the Sun off!), Sopwith must find a wife inside three hours. Turns out it’s not that easy, Soppy.
Meanwhile, popular astrologer and certified lifesaver O’Flaherty Gribble, a favorite guest on Sopwith’s show, has discovered the Callisto Effect and how to build striped holes. And in a future that makes Nineteen Eighty-Four look like Brave New World or vice versa, beautiful Hsia Shan-Yun is about to have her brain scrubbed for knitting one of those striped holes, with frightful consequences. But luckily, O’Flaherty finds himself seated on a plane next to God. Tighten your belt, it’s that kind of novel.

Chosen Among The Beautiful – Cho, for short – has been alone her whole life. Orphaned, she was raised by machines, with her cat, Divine Endurance, for company.

When an earthquake destroys her isolated shelter, Cho leaves to find her long lost brother, cat in tow. She finds herself in a land torn apart by warring gangs, clans and princes, revolutionaries and outcasts, all under the thumb of the distance Rulers, reduced to petty in-fighting to try and gain any power at all.

Divine Endurance seeks out the Rulers; Cho instead finds Derveet, a rebel leader. She finds love.

Can there be a future for them in this brutal world? What does Cho really know about humanity after being separated from it all her life? What does she even know about herself?

A gripping retelling of the myth of Perseus by award-winning author Gwyneth Jones, writing as Ann Halam.

Perseus, the God-Touched son of Zeus, lives in luxury on the island of Serifos. But trouble is brewing in the world – Gods and mortals are bringing discord closer to his home shores.

When a beautiful stranger, a fugitive from another disaster zone, arrives on the island, Perseus is smitten. But Andromeda isn’t all she seems. She must die to save her people, and a stunning, world-changing discovery will die with her, unless Perseus abandons everything to confront the Medusa quest.

Caught in a freak storm, John Webster takes shelter in an old barn with weird symbols carved in the doors. The landowner offers him a place to stay and John, on leave from University, takes him up on the offer.

But it turns out the barn has more history than he first suspected. A portal back in time, to be precise. He meets the beautiful Johanna, who is being tracked by the Witch Finder General. Modern science says that witches aren’t real… but then, neither are portals back in time, so what can John believe?

John finds himself torn between the past and the present, caught in a web of magic, mystery, suspicion and witchhunts.

BOOK ONE OF THE PERILOUS QUEST FOR LYONESSE

In the year of Our Lord 1403, as England smoulders with suppressed rebellion, young Simon Branthwaite sets sail across the Atlantic in search of the lost realm of Lyonesse. His quest will take him to Rockall, a land wreathed in legend; a land of weird beasts and wondrous happenings, of great beauties and terrible dangers.

And there begin adventures stranger than the wildest of Simon’s imaginings; adventures that will change the course of his life and reshape that land for ever…

Princes of Sandastre is the first in Anthony Swithin’s fantastical Lyonesse sequence, edited by Mark Sebanc.

A superb thriller, romance and spy novel from ‘The best in his field since Buchan’ Observer

Arabesque is a love story that takes us to the colourful crossroads of the Middle East at the height of World War II

Armande Herne – half English, half French and impassively beautiful – is sitting out the war in Beirut with no visible means of support. The rumour is she’s a spy. But, as conflict between British and French, Jew and Arab whirl around her, it is a British security sergeant who finds her. Soon they are embroiled in a plot, rich with adventure and intrigue.

Another superbly crafted Middle Eastern adventure by the author of the classic Rogue Male

They called the organisation World Opposition. Its aim was a world where the State no longer existed and where the individual controlled their own destiny.

Their headquarters were called Kasr-el-Sittat – meaning fortress of the holy women – and their leader was the strange and beautiful Elisa Cantemir. For her, no method was too ruthless, no human life too valuable, compared with the aims of the organisation.

Only one man knew their real aims and opposed them. And he was desperately in love with Elisa Cantemir.