The Vintner's Luck


Book Description

A 19th century French winemaker is visited by a male angel and falls in love. The angel visits him once a year and the friendship leads to a triangle involving the winemaker's wife.




The Vintner's Luck


Book Description

The Vintner's Luck is Elizabeth Knox's stunning novel of angels, wine, and love without boundaries set in nineteenth-century Burgundy--and the basis for the 2009 internationally acclaimed film from director Niki Caro. One summer night in 1808, Sobran Jodeau sets out to drown his love sorrows in his family's vineyard when he stumbles on an angel. Once he gets over his shock, Sobran decides that Xas, the male angel, is his guardian sent to counsel him on everything from marriage to wine production. But Xas turns out to be a far more mysterious character. Compelling and erotic, The Vintner's Luck explores a decidedly unorthodox love story as Sobran eventually comes to love and be loved by both Xas and the young Countess de Valday, his friend and employer at the neighboring chateau.




The Vintner's Luck


Book Description

Burgundy, 1808, and one midsummer night a young vintner named Sobran Jodeau meets an angel in his vineyard. They meet every year thereafter; and despite the vicissitudes both of world history and village life, the vintages keep improving.




The Angel's Cut


Book Description

Los Angeles 1929: into the world of soundstages and speakeasies comes Xas stunt flier and wingless angel with his French pilot's licence and his broken heart determined only go on living in the air. What does it take to turn the wind? Mountains. Or another wind.




Billie's Kiss


Book Description

With an Edwardian twist on The Tempest, and surprising, earthy, and magical qualities, this irresistible novel is set on the remote, divided Scottish island of Kissack and Skilling, one half of which looks historically and geographically towards Catholic Ireland, the other toward the Protestant north and Scandinavia. In the spring of 1903 a ship explodes as it docks on the island, drowning many of the passengers and crew in the icy waters of Stolnsay harbor. Young, strawberry-blonde-haired Billie Paxton is among the only survivors. Clumsy, illiterate, and suddenly alone, Billie will not say why, before the explosion, she jumped from ship to shore, and so falls under the immediate suspicion of her fellow passenger, Murdo Hesketh, and his cousin and employer, Lord Hallowhulme, who owns the island—and has controversial plans for improving the lives of its inhabitants. Gloriously inventive and vividly atmospheric, Billie’s Kiss conjures up a way of life hurtling toward a brave new world in an enchanting novel that brings together murder and eugenics, progress, prejudice, and the loss of innocence.




Daylight


Book Description

Brian “Bad” Phelan, New Zealander and bomb-disposal expert, likes to live dangerously. While on vacation on the French–Italian border, he helps bring a body out of a rocky, wave-swept cove. The dead woman bears striking similarities to a young woman he met years ago, under mysterious circumstances, shortly before she disappeared in a flooded French cave and Bad is compelled to investigate. Meanwhile, Jesuit Father Daniel Octave is running his own investigation into the truth behind the story of the life of the Blessed Martine Raimondi, a WWII resistance heroine and martyred nun. Bad and Daniel’s questions lead them to Eve, the beautiful widow of a celebrated French artist, and to Dawn, Eve’s twin sister, who seems to be a vampire. For, though they don’t know it, Bad and Daniel are looking for the same thing: a secret family. Sensuous and heavenly, Daylight combines wildly imaginative storytelling and a clear eye for atmosphere and place. Set on the beautiful Mediterranean coast stretching from Avignon to Genoa, much of the novel takes place in a world the tourist never sees, a world of caves and secret passages. It is in this “world beneath the world” that Bad Phelan and Daniel Octave finds themselves face to face with history and myth, with phantoms whose hearts are still beating, hungry, and able to break.




Dreamhunter


Book Description

Laura comes from a world similar to our own except for one difference: it is next to the Place, an unfathomable land that fosters dreams of every kind and is inaccessible to all but a select few, the Dreamhunters. These are individuals with special gifts: the ability to catch larger-than-life dreams and relay them to audiences in the magnificent dream palace, the Rainbow Opera. People travel from all around to experience the benefits of the hunters' unique visions. Now fifteen-year-old Laura and her cousin Rose, daughters of Dreamhunters, are eligible to test themselves at the Place and find out whether they qualify for the passage. But nothing can prepare them for what they are about to discover. For within the Place lies a horrific secret kept hidden by corrupt members of the government. And when Laura's father, the man who discovered the Place, disappears, she realizes that this secret has the power to destroy everyone she loves . . . In the midst of a fascinating landscape, Laura's dreamy childhood is ending and a nightmare beginning. This rich novel, filled with beauty, danger, politics, and intrigue, comes to a powerful crescendo, leaving readers clamoring for Book Two. Dreamhunter is a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year. "It is like nothing else I've ever read." -- Stephenie Meyer, The Twilight Saga




Black Oxen


Book Description

In the year 2022 and in pursuit of her beautiful and not-quite-human father, Carme Risk enters narrative therapy. Propelled by her memories and her father's journal, which take her from the Edenic island of her childhood to arevolutionary Latin American nation to life in northern California, Risk moves through worlds of romantic intrigue, machete murders, occult freedom fighters, and surrealist bacchanals. A roiling and wildly entertaining ride, Black Oxen is a hyperinventive novel of political revolution, black magic, sexual predation, and a therapist's couch.




Wake


Book Description

One sunny spring morning the Tasman Bay settlement of Kahukura is overwhelmed by a mysterious mass insanity. A handful of survivors find themselves cut off from the world, and surrounded by the dead. As they try to take care of one another, and survive in ever more difficult circumstances, it becomes apparent that this isn't the first time that this has happened, and that they aren't all survivors and victims—two of them are something quite other. And, it seems, they are trapped with something. Something unseen is picking at the loose threads of their characters, corrupting, provoking, and haunting them. Wake is a novel about what it really means to try to do one's best, about the choices and sacrifices people face in order to keep a promise like "I will take care of you." It is a novel that asks: What are the last things left when the worst has happened? and about extreme events, ordinary people, heroic compassion—and invisible monsters. An invisible monster is what one can't see coming; with an invisible monster one never knows when they're in danger and when they're safe—if they retreat to their fortress they can't be sure they haven't locked it in with them.




The Absolute Book


Book Description

DISCOVER THE ENCHANTING EPIC THAT WILL TRANSPORT YOU TO OTHER WORLDS . . . 'AN INSTANT CLASSIC' GUARDIAN 'BEWITCHING' THE TIMES 'MIND-BLOWING' LAINI TAYLOR 'ASTOUNDING' FRANCIS SPUFFORD 'GORGEOUSLY WRITTEN' DEBORAH HARKNESS _______ Taryn Cornick barely remembers the family library. Since her sister was murdered, she's forgotten so much. Now it's all coming back. The fire. The thief. The scroll box. People are asking questions about the library. Questions that might relate to her sister's murder. And something called The Absolute Book. A book in which secrets are written - and which everyone believes only she can find. They insist Taryn be the hunter. But she knows the truth. She is the hunted . . . _______ The Absolute Book is a tale of sisters, ancient blood, a forgotten library, murder, revenge and a book that might just have the answer to everything. 'An instant classic . . . A work to rank alongside other modern masterpieces of fantasy such as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series or Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Everything fantasy should be: original, magical, well read, compelling' GUARDIAN 'Astonishing. Gripping. Hugely ambitious. An extraordinary conclusion. Admire the sheer scope and grandeur' DAILY MAIL 'A marvellous argument for stories. There are Norse gods, references to Merlin, a tour through purgatory and a strange parallel world where magic is real and humans are bit players in the clash of supernatural realms. Bewitching' THE TIMES 'Contains multitudes, spanning the geographies of Canada, Britain and New Zealand; the cosmologies of fairies, demons and angels; and the genres of thriller, domestic realism and epic fantasy . . . I'm in awe of it' NEW YORK TIMES Review of Books 'Intricately plotted and gorgeously written, THE ABSOLUTE BOOK has something for everyone . . . Here is a cinematic tale that is by turns dark and dreamlike, yet ultimately hopeful' DEBORAH HARKNESS, author of A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES 'Fantastical' THE TIMES 'Savour and absorb the world Knox conjures' SUNDAY TIMES 'Gorgeous. The payoffs and reveals are mind-blowing' LAINI TAYLOR, author of DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE 'An angelic book, an apocalyptic book, an astounding book' FRANCIS SPUFFORD