Peter Pitched a Tent


Book Description

"Never make eye contact with a boy while eating a banana."--Olivia WilliamsBimisi and Sumguyen experienced a rare and fleeting moment of sobriety during which they decided to write about something the masses can relate to. While their research did require the navigation of some very murky waters...they definitively concluded that Catholic priests, mall Santas, boy scout leaders and dudes named Caitlyn makeup a very small percentage of the global population.In contrast, 97% of the people on the planet are, have been or will be a 13 year old boy; or they know, have known or will know a 13 year old boy. Coincidently, and Independent of this statistic, 97% of the population can appreciate the truth-driven humor of Peter Pitched a Tent. The other 3% are already posting nasty-grams on the internet about the very existence of this book...Go get 'em, Karen.




Blindsight


Book Description

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




All Roads Lead Home: A 2-in-1 Collection


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A Friend or Two, available in ebook for the first time, and Reflections of Yesterday, two of Debbie Macomber’s classic novels that explore the power of hope and forgiveness available in one book. A Friend or Two: Elizabeth Wainwright, an East Coast heiress, moves to San Francisco and takes a job at a Fisherman’s Wharf café, eager to live a simpler life and separate herself from her wealthy background. There, she meets Andrew Breed, a handsome, mysterious, and charismatic customer who claims to be a longshoreman. As she gets to know him, however, Breed’s words and actions don’t quite add up—is Elizabeth falling in love with someone who’s pretending to be something he’s not? Reflections of Yesterday: Twelve years have passed since Angie Robinson fled her hometown of Groves Point, South Carolina, with ten thousand dollars and a broken heart. She knows Simon Canfield still lives there. His powerful family practically owns the town. Now she’s back, if only to return the money Simon’s mother paid her to leave. For too long Angie has lived with her regrets, her mistakes, and her suffering. If there’s forgiveness to be had, the time has come.




Sir Apropos of Nothing


Book Description

They were dark and stormy knights...and when they had their way with a helpless tavern wench one terrible evening, they had no idea that the result of that twilight brutality was going to come after them years later looking to settle the score... The "result's" unlikely name is Apropos: A rogue, a rascal, a scoundrel, a cheat...and those are his good points. Lame of leg but fast of wit, the only reason Apropos doesn't consider chivalry dead is because he's not yet through with it. Herewith, Sir Apropos of Nothing -- his story in the words of the knave himself. Apropos, all too aware of his violent and unseemly beginnings, travels to the court of the good King Runcible, with three goals in mind: to find his father, seek retribution, and line his own pockets. However, Apropos carries the most troublesome burden a would-be harbinger of chaos can bear: He may well be a hero foretold, a young man of destiny. It is not a notion that Apropos finds palatable, having very low regard for such notions as honor, selflessness, or risking one's neck. Yet when Apropos finds himself assigned as squire to the most senile knight in the court -- Sir Umbrage of the Flaming Nether Regions, whose squires tend to have a rather short life span -- Apropos is forced to rise to the occasion lest he be dragged under -- permanently. His difficulties are compounded when a routine mission to escort the King's daughter home after a long absence goes horribly awry. Suddenly Apropos finds himself saddled with trying to survive while dealing with a berserk phoenix, murderous unicorns, mutated harpies, homicidal warrior kings, and -- most problematic of all -- a princess who may or may not be a psychotic arsonist. Featuring a hero cut from cloth similar to that of such entertaining blackguards as Blackadder and Flashman, Sir Apropos of Nothing is a skewed version of classic, mythic adventure that is by turns hilarious and frightening, slapstick and serious, and filled with drop-dead laughs and drop-dead people.




A Princess of Roumania


Book Description

A triump of contemporary fantasy, Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania is a truly magical tale, full of strangeness, terrors and wonders. Many girls daydream that they are really a princess adopted by commoners. In the case of teenager Miranda Popescu, this is literally true. Because she is at the fulcrum of a deadly political battle between conjurers in an alternate world where "Roumania" is a leading European power, Miranda was hidden by her aunt in our world, where she was adopted and raised in a quiet Massachusetts college town. The narrative is split between our world and the people in Roumania working to protect or to capture Miranda: her Aunt Aegypta Schenck versus the mad Baroness Ceaucescu in Bucharest, and the sinister alchemist, the Elector of Ratisbon, who holds her true mother prisoner in Germany. This is the story of how Miranda -- with her two best friends, Peter and Andromeda -- is brought back to her home reality. Each of them is changed in the process and all will have much to learn about their true identities and the strange world they find themselves in. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




Miss Rush-Rush


Book Description

Ruth leaves her comfortable, settled home in Durban, to live among a tribe of nomads in Uganda. I waved goodbye to my family at Durban airport, and flew to Nairobi. I half-hoped for a miracle mid-air to change me into the super-heroine missionaries are supposed to be. Nothing happened. I got off the plane, the same Ruth Stranex, who had been assessed by my Oxford college as not outstanding. Yet I was facing an outstandingly tough job, only possible with Gods help. Ruth has to adapt to the culture of the Pokot people: to their diet of cows blood and milk; their cattle-raiding wars; their frenzied search for water-holes. She delivers their babies, treats their malaria and sews up their spear wounds. She cleans up the infected sores left by witchdoctors trying to let out evil spirits. She challenges their goat sacrifices intended to appease an angry god. She tells them about the one sacrifice offered for them by the Lamb of God who is Love. Then, without any warning, she is arrested, driven for 2 days, between policewomen with kalashnikovs and locked in a foul cell ..... Youll love her frankness and her humour. Youll wish you had friends like her African Christian friends. You may wish you had a faith like hers.




Fragile Blood


Book Description

Others thought she had everything a woman could want, an adoring husband, two wonderful children and a life many would be envious of, other than Agnes. This is a novel, based on a true story, about an American nurse who leaves her native Oregon and starts up a new life in Freiburg with her German husband. Early on in her marriage she realizes that her relationship with the young physicist-teacher is deteriorating. She doesn't love him anymore, yet is reluctant to admit it. What is she to do? The dilemma is a common one. The emancipated, loving and direct manner in which she finally approaches separation and continues on with her life is all but common. Her pursuit? She wants to find her soul mate, and what a surprise it is when she does. Her life is turned upside down, and in more ways than one. This is a book for any responsible bumbler or stumbler, male or female, who is equipped with a loving heart and an open soul and, who has decided to live life according to intuition, even though it can be scary sometimes.




Brenda's Beaver Needs a Barber


Book Description

Sumguyen has always had a thick mane of hair, in the summer of 2016 he decided to grow a beard. Deep into month three he started to look like an armpit with eyeballs.It was a sultry August night in Old Town Scottsdale as Bimisi and Sumguyen made their way from one bar to another. They took pause to to enjoy the rhythms of a homeless crooner who was soulfully picking his guitar. When Sumguyen threw a five into his tip jar the artist looked up, thanked him with a nod and said, "That is a beautiful beard. My friend Brenda has a beard just like that, but hers doesn't talk."A fair amount of beer sprayed from Bimisi's nose...and just like that they had their subject matter for the final book of season one. Brenda's Beaver Needs a Barber is the fifth of five books that make up Reach Around Books Season One.




Green Boy and Stories of Other Creators


Book Description

The book is about eight fired-up young Indian men and women. Their vision of excellence, coupled with their creativity, persistence, and indomitable spirit, helps them emerge as unique individuals. They overcome obstacles in their path, including their own mental blocks. They come from diverse backgrounds, representative of the diversity of contemporary India. One of them is a domestic servant, another is from a lower middle-class family, the third belongs to the family of an academician, the fourth comes from an extremely orthodox Brahmin family, the fifth is of mixed Indian-Canadian descent, and so forth. Their personalities are as diverse as their backgrounds. But what they share in common is grit, the spirit of innovation, a humane concern for others, and the desire to extend the limits of their being. Their achievements are also diverse. One becomes the discoverer of consciousness in plants; another transforms a society a thousand years hence; the third sets up a school to foster creativity in children; the fourth becomes an outstanding painter; the fifth, a highly innovative farmer; the sixth, a pioneer of organ transplants; the seventh, a pioneer of colours distilled from rocks; and the eighth triumphs over her ingrained fear of ghosts to become a counselor who heals wounded beings. These scintillating stories are written in a simple style but with arresting images. They are spiced with action and racy dialogues that make them highly engrossing.




Death in the Long Grass


Book Description

As thrilling as any novel, as taut and exciting as any adventure story, Peter Hathaway Capstick’s Death in the Long Grass takes us deep into the heart of darkness to view Africa through the eyes of one of the most renowned professional hunters. Few men can say they have known Africa as Capstick has known it—leading safaris through lion country; tracking man-eating leopards along tangled jungle paths; running for cover as fear-maddened elephants stampede in all directions. And of the few who have known this dangerous way of life, fewer still can recount their adventures with the flair of this former professional hunter-turned-writer. Based on Capstick’s own experiences and the personal accounts of his colleagues, Death in the Long Grassportrays the great killers of the African bush—not only the lion, leopard, and elephant, but the primitive rhino and the crocodile waiting for its unsuspecting prey, the titanic hippo and the Cape buffalo charging like an express train out of control. Capstick was a born raconteur whose colorful descriptions and eye for exciting, authentic detail bring us face to face with some of the most ferocious killers in the world—underrated killers like the surprisingly brave and cunning hyena, silent killers such as the lightning-fast black mamba snake, collective killers like the wild dog. Readers can lean back in a chair, sip a tall, iced drink, and revel in the kinds of hunting stories Hemingway and Ruark used to hear in hotel bars from Nairobi to Johannesburg, as veteran hunters would tell of what they heard beyond the campfire and saw through the sights of an express rifle.