Search Results for: stay

When young Sarah Parrish takes a skiing holiday in Gulmarg, a resort high above the fabled vale of Kashmir, she anticipates an amusing but uneventful stay. But the discovery of the grotesque corpse of grey-haired, sociable Mrs Matthews casts a dark shadow over the party. On learning the real truth about her death, Sarah is plunged into a deadly intrigue of secret messages, mysterious rendezvous – and murder.

A delicious blend of menace and romance set against the background of M. M. Kaye’s beloved India.

When Meg Frazer’s actress mother is killed in a Hollywood accident, nineteen-year-old Meg finds it hard to adapt to life in Britain with her cold, distant father . . . and at night she is haunted by a strange dream of a face which she is sure has something to do with her past.

Meg follows a clue from the past to a remote Cornish Village. There she becomes involved in a nightmare web of terror and suspense . . . She meets a young man called Toby, who is different from her staid fiancé, but how is he wrapped up in the secrets she is unravelling?

First written as a short suspense story in the 1960’s, this YA romantic thriller went on to win an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Joan Aiken in 1972

“A cunning thriller romance, with the ever popular suspense and terror… good holiday reading for the not so bookish” Elaine Moss, Times

“Young, beautiful, talented, engaged to a handsome and successful stockbroker, she should have been content to stay in London. But irresistibly Meg was drawn back to Penlaggen…back into a forgotten past… And waiting for her was a man who exercised a strange and fearful power over her…and a secret that led her ever closer to danger” Fiction Database

“The suspense is wonderfully sustained and leads to a terrifying climax, and there is even a satisfying love story” Publisher’s Weekly

“A dream has haunted nineteen-year-old Meg for ten years, ever since her mother’s death. Now engaged and determined to exorcise the dream before her marriage, Meg drives to the remote Cornwall village of Penleggen where the author’s gift for direful scene and gripping incident takes control…the physical danger mounts as Meg’s psychological mystery is solved and a literate thriller gathers momentum” Kirkus review

The orphan had always known she wasn’t what people described as ‘normal’. Whether merely precocious or a mutant freak, she had always been able to link minds with an equally weird mutated lion and skip into the worlds of the fourth dimension.



What the heck, it sure beat staying in school on Earth – that is until she realized that some of her fellow dimension-hoppers from other planets had more in mind than just a romp in the swamp.



They were launching an inter-dimensional war of imperialism, and she alone held the secret which could save her home world – if she could only escape the truant officer long enough to pull it off!

Just when it looked as if Ethan Fortune might be able to breathe a warm sigh of relief at getting away from the icy world of Tran-ky-ky, he was ordered to stay right where he was.

It seemed the scientists at the outpost of Brass Monkey had spotted something odd – an isolated and ominous atmosphere hot spot far to the south.

Only Ethan, along with the huge, hell-raising Skua September, had the local knowledge and the persuasiveness to get the Tran to mount an expedition. Only the giant icerigger Slanderscree could cope with the conditions.

Knowing you’re wanted may warm the cockles of the human heart but Ethan knew at once that the rest of him was going to be exposed to freezing cold, considerable danger and a whole lot more of the adventures that kept coming his way…

When human genes go wild, reproduction can no longer be left to chance – and it is Robert Wellton, Chief of the Genetics Bureau, the most feared and hated man in the world, who decides who will mate with whom.
But nobody can tell Wellton whom to mate with! He alone knows that the Genetics Program is collapsing, for fewer Normals are found each yer – and his father, who had been Genetics Chief before him, had discovered that not all Deviates are nature’s failures. Some are telepathic and long-lived – like Robert Wellton himself.
Thus is born the plan that Adam Wellton conceived and that Robert Wellton carries on – the creation of a Secret People. Born of Normal mothers, they are all Wellton’s sons and daughters, bearing his improved genes – living hidden in a colony in the Canadian wilderness, protected from the hate and jealousy of civilization by Wellton, who stays in telepathic touch with them.
But disaster strikes when a bitter powerful committee, suspecting the existence of concealed Deviates, begins a relentless search for them. Wellton knows there can be only one result – he Secret People will be hunted down and wiped out!

The countryside is hundreds of feet deep in snow, and a small community is managing to exist in the bell-tower of a church, just above the snow level. For sustenance they make journeys to the shops of the village far below by tunnels. They also stay alive by hunting the ferocious and telepathic bear-like animals known as Pals.



The individuals in the small group are brilliantly portrayed, in turn defeatist, boastful, querulous, selfish and generous. They are obsessive, they argue; but when danger threatens, as it often does, they immediately band together in their common fight for survival.

Carson Napier, first Earthman to reach Venus, had to keep alert every instant of his stay on that world of mist and mystery. For its lands were unmapped, its inhabitants many, varied, and strange, and he had taken an obligation to restore a native princess to her lost homeland. On terrible oceans where dreaded sea-monsters dwelled, in deep forests where terror haunted every branch, and behind the walls of eerie cities where power-mad chieftains plotted uncanny schemes, “Carson of Venus” is fast-paced science fiction adventure.

An urgent message from Pellucidar, that world of primitive men and primeval jungles that lies inside the crust of the Earth, called on Tarzan of the Apes for assistance.

Tarzan, used to the dangers of darkest Africa, heeded the call to Pellucidar, where all his skill in the jungle, all his talents with beasts and primitive men, would be put to the extreme test. For in that land at the Earth’s core, under the eternal day of the Central Sun, his terrific talents were needed just to stay alive – let alone to fulfil the mission that had called him there!

Keston Ochiltree’s visit home had been short and disastrous. His newborn nephew had proved to be one of the Hopeless Ones and had only served to remind him of the present plight of mankind. Keston knew that the decision he was being called on to make might mean a new start for humanity or the end of their underwater civilization.

Each day found more Hopeless Ones being born: pitiful creatures with webbed hands and feet. More important, the inhuman Zammu were pressing their attack in a fierce struggle between species. Most important, the silver sky was lowering. The shimmering sky-level would soon shrink until they had all burned in the gaseous beyond.

So Keston’s decision might mean everything. Should he stay in the Emperor’s shark-cavalry to fight the Zammu? Or should he join Professor Lansing in an illegal attempt to find what lay beyond the silver sky?

A Story of the People of the Sea

The adventure begins when Johnny, who has run away from home and hidden aboard an intercontinental hovership, is shipwrecked in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. Stranded on a raft, and in an apparently hopeless situation, he is propelled by a pack of dolphins towards an island in the Great Barrier Reef, a famous centre for Dolphin Research.

Professor Kazan, the director of research, shares Johnny’s bewilderment as to the reason for the dolphin rescue operation and arranges for Johnny to stay on the island to assist in unravelling the mystery. In the chapters that follow, Johnny learns how to communicate with dolphins, explores the coral reef, goes skin-diving at night, survives a fearful hurricane, unearths a horrifying underwater conspiracy, and, in an intensely exciting final episode, makes a dangerous 100 mile tip on surfboard towed, turn and turn about, by his two closest dolphin friends.

Videssos was beset by enemies. A pretender held the throne – a despot who cared little that barbarian hordes and rival realms carved away at his empire, so long as the wealth and booty of the land satisfied his unbridled appetites.

Few stood against him. And those few soon found their heads on pikes.

Only one name held hope for freedom: Maniakes. And from his exile on the very edge of the civilised world, young Maniakes took up the challenge, rallied his forces, and sailed off to topple the tyrant.

But that tyrant would use every means at his disposal – fair or most hideously foul – to destroy the crusading upstart. And even if Maniakes could stay alive, he would till have to pull together a battered, divided land as well as fend off a host of enemies – and thwart the former friend who had become his empire’s most deadly foe!

Hesta Web, with her hot red hair and her tough, guarded coldness, is trapped with a mother who hates her and a father who is mostly away earning money on an oil rig. When Hesta discovers that her mother and her mother’s lover have had rampant sex in Hesta’s bed, she absconds with her friend Janey to the seaside.

It is the last day of the season, sun bright and sea sparkling. The bars and shops are open, the funfair spins round with shrieks and shouts. As night falls, the illuminations go on. But when Janey catches the last train to London, Hesta stays behind. She falls in with the gothic-looking, unpleasantly attractive Skilt and his subject colony of junkies and beggars. In a rotting hotel on the front, among the broken marble balustrades, the mouse-eaten rooms and the bonfire in the ballroom, Hesta takes up her new life. She hears drugged legends told beside the fire, the rumours of ghosts and the strangeness of the sea.

For now the season has ended, the seaside is deserted, the illuminations are switched off, this place is very strange. Does Skilt know its secret? Should Hesta be wary of the blond man who watches her from the pier? And what happens when the lights go out?

It’s dark.

In Peril on an Alien Planet…

Alan Green was not a hero – he liked the quiet life as much as the next man. Not that he was exactly afraid of the fearsome hound, Alzo, or his hot-blooded owner, the Duchess Zuni. After all, one expected violence on this primitive planet and a man could manage to stay alive, provided he was alert twenty-four hours a day.

But when he heard of a spaceship about to leave for Earth, Alan persuaded the merchant-captain of a windroller to take him to it. And hence to the peaceful green hills of home.

He had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the ‘travelling islands’, the rascally captain, and various peculiar local flora and fauna – all of which, it seemed, regarded Alan with unnerving malevolence…

Behind the walls of Terra lay a secret no man could be allowed to learn. But Kickaha – the Earth-born adventurer of the tiered worlds – had to uncover that secret, or watch his home world destroyed.

Kickaha was returning to Earth from the World of Tiers, the many-levelled universe of the god-like Lords, that he had entered many years ago as Paul Janus Finnegan. Now he had returned to a world he no longer knew, to find it ruled by Red Orc, a Lord jealous of his personal domain and hostile to intruders. Yet Kickaha had to stay alive in order to defeat the deadly enemy that threatened Earth and the other worlds of tiers – the ‘Beller’, the malignant creature that was the mind-essence of a rebel Lord.

Muzic Inc had become a music industry giant by staying one step ahead of the game, but for some reason APs (totally cybernetic rock stars) had failed to ship gold.
That was where Glorianna O’Toole came in. The Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll was well into her sixties, but with her producer they hoped to synthesize an AP that would really take off.
Glorianna hated everything Muzic Inc had done to the rebel music of her youth, but for the sake of a steady supply of designer dust she was prepared to try and rekindle the revolutionary music spirit of the 1960s.
Meanwhile, at street level, the wire wizards had come up with a new piece of technology: a portable trip machine that made Owsley acid look like a vitamin supplement…

College student Nicholas Dal shares the family talent, or curse – he is an empath, a man who experiences the emotions of other people. Too-powerful emotion can induce seizures, so to stay sane he must live alone and dull his senses with vodka.

This, in itself, would be enough for anyone to bear, but Nicholas ias also haunted by a secret from his family’s past in Russia. Now someone is looking for him and he fears the worst. To further complicate things, a relationship is forming with a young woman, Jack, and his feelings for her threaten to break through his isolation.

Will Nicholas risk his love, his sanity – his life – to be with Jack?

British Science Fiction award winner Ian Watson graces us here with a brilliant new collection of short stories and essays.

Though he dazzles the reader with his footwork in the kaleidoscope intensity of his vision, each piece is plainly the work of a master craftsman. Whether he is dealing with a future culture where whales control us (“The Culling”) or taking a hilarious poke at the matter of government funding (“The President’s Not for Turning”), his concepts are clear and undeniably logical.

True to the highest ideal of science fiction, Watson carries present tendencies of our society to possible conclusions in “Roof Gardens under Saturn,” and points a warning finger at the consequences of alienation from the environment.

In an innovative style which borders on the experimental, Watson explores in “The Pharaoh and the Mademoiselle” the horrors of fascism.

Ian Watson’s writing stays with us. He entertains and he makes us think. If in some future and better world politicians were to take advice form writers, Watson should be one of them.

In every mouse’s long life, there comes a time when ancestral voices tell him to move on. Pedlar, a yellow-necked mouse, has reached that point. Told to leave the Hedgerow and go on a long journey, the adventurous mouse says his farewells and sets out for a far-distant country knows as The House. Reaching his destination, Pedlar enters a strange new world inhabited by many warring tribes: the Stinkhorns of the cellar, the great Savage Tribe in the kitchen, the library Bookeaters, the Invisibles, the Deathshead and the rebellious 13-K Gang.

During his stay, Pedlar witnesses a momentous truce, in which the tribes come together at an Allthing meeting and decide to rid themselves of the greatest pests in The House, the greedy, stupid nudniks – the humans. And so the Great Nudnik Drive is set in motion, a time of considerable anxiety for the nudniks, when clocks strike twenty and inanimate objects seem to have a life of their own. Ranged against the mouse tribes are the nudniks’ allies: the two cats, Eyeball the Burmese blue and Spitz the ginger tom; the Headhunter, a barbarian human child; and Little Prince, the Headhunter’s cannibalistic pet white mouse. The House becomes a hotbed of riot and discord, until Pedlar finally comes up with a solution. The outcome of this heroic struggle has gone down in the annals of mouse history, a history tens of thousands of days long, and the whole remarkable tale is recorded here, between these pages.

Captain Sir Dominic Flandry was a top man in the Intelligence Corps of the Imperial Terrestrial Navy. He knew that on the outer edges of the empire, civilisation was spread hideously thin. The stars faded towards barbarism, with the great evil Empire of Merseia beyond.

But there were times when Flandry abandoned his senior position of command to go out into the field. Then he operated like the cool and brilliant agent he was, a ruthless, highly-trained professional. And in these three fast-moving adventures Captain Dominic Flandry shows that a space-age secret agent has to stay on top of the job – or succumb to nameless horrors.

Marcus King, ruthless entrepreneur and commercial giant, was a man obsessed. His obsession-staying alive! He used his millions to buy life from the bodies of others. Then someone devised a highly scientific plan to kill him-only for King to survive the attack, and plan his revenge. But who was the mastermind behind the assassination attempt?

Dale Markham, chief of local police, is quickly on the crime scene. But the case is so bizarre, with far-reaching international implications, that Security is also called in and special agent Steve Delmonte is assigned to work with the police.

Delmonte’s investigations uncover a tangled web of sadistic intrigue and he has to follows a trail of further murders all the way to the moon before the incredible truth behind the attack is revealed.

On Angado’s planet, there was a man who knew the whereabouts of the lost Earth. Earl Dumarest, born on Earth, longed to find the way home. Because they were comrades in arms, Angado would help Earl find that man – for a price.

For Angado was returning to a complex of high-tech cunning and high-wealth power . . . the prodigal son against whom all would plot. The Cyclan, who had put a fabulous price on Dumarest’s head, were also closing in. But Dumarest was willing to stay to the bitter end – for the priceless reward of forgotten Terra.





(First published 1984)

The Terridae believed the lost Earth was heaven and utopia combined. In their artificial planet, they moved slowly through the universe in search of it. And in their eyes, the rediscovery of Earth was to be the Event.

Now they said the Event was coming! Earl Dumarest – who was born on Earth and knew the truth – was an unwelcome visitor among them. If they knew of Earth’s whereabouts, they were not telling him.

But another Event was already on its way. A Cyclan ship was rapidly approaching the Terridae’s world, confident that this time Dumarest would fall into their heartless clutches.

Dumarest was not ready to flee – but if he stayed there would be no Earth for him, only a long, lingering doom.





(First published 1982)

The Lexman Spacedrive gave man the stars – but at a fantastic price.

Interstellar exploration, colonisation, and trade became things of reality. The benefits to Earth were enormous but, because of the Fitzgerald Contraction, a man who shipped out to space could never live a normal life on Earth again. Travelling at speeds close to that of light, spacemen lived at an accelerated pace. A nine-year trip to Alpha Centauri and back seemed to take only six weeks to men on a spaceship. When they returned, their friends and relatives had aged enormously in comparison, old customs had changed, even the language was different.

Alan was a spacer, just like his whole family – until, suddenly and without intending to, he in turn jumped ship and remained on Earth. There were times he regretted that. Earth was a bewildering and utterly hostile place. To stay alive, he had to play a ruthless game – and he couldn’t even find anyone to tell him the rules. . . .


First published in 1958.

In the second century AD, a Greek nobleman is travelling and living abroad in Germany while carrying on an affair with a military man’s wife. When discovered, he takes an emergency business trip to save his life and packs amongst his belongings certain items that lead the people he encounters to think him a Norse God, a fortuitous point of view which he does little to dispel. Forced to keep up the pretence of being a god while staying one step ahead of his lover’s jealous husband, Photinus must juggle the severity of his situation with the enjoyment of being a God.