The Night of the Triffids


Book Description

A sequel to John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic horror classic The Day of the Triffids: “An action-filled tale that captures the spirit of the original story” (Library Journal). Winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel In The Day of the Triffids, Bill Masen escapes with his family to a colony on the Isle of Wight after a meteor shower blinds most of the human race and the deadly Triffid plants begin to take over the world. Now the story continues, more than twenty-five years later, as pilot David Masen, Bill’s son, travels in search of an effective weapon against the Triffids. In New York City, he discovers a group of people who appear to be immune to the Triffids’ deadly poison. But all is not as it seems in this colony, and soon David must face a dangerous adversary from his family’s past . . . “Brisk and engaging . . . This crafty continuation is elegant in its construction . . . A truly enjoyable voyage.” —Publishers Weekly




The Day of the Triffids


Book Description

The classic postapocalyptic thriller with “all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare” (The Times, London). Triffids are odd, interesting little plants that grow in everyone’s garden. Triffids are no more than mere curiosities—until an event occurs that alters human life forever. What seems to be a spectacular meteor shower turns into a bizarre, green inferno that blinds everyone and renders humankind helpless. What follows is even stranger: spores from the inferno cause the triffids to suddenly take on a life of their own. They become large, crawling vegetation, with the ability to uproot and roam about the country, attacking humans and inflicting pain and agony. William Masen somehow managed to escape being blinded in the inferno, and now after leaving the hospital, he is one of the few survivors who can see. And he may be the only one who can save his species from chaos and eventual extinction . . . With more than a million copies sold, The Day of the Triffids is a landmark of speculative fiction, and “an outstanding and entertaining novel” (Library Journal). “A thoroughly English apocalypse, it rivals H. G. Wells in conveying how the everyday invaded by the alien would feel. No wonder Stephen King admires Wyndham so much.” —Ramsey Campbell, author of The Overnight “One of my all-time favorite novels. It’s absolutely convincing, full of little telling details, and that sweet, warm sensation of horror and mystery.” —Joe R. Lansdale, author of Edge of Dark Water




Failure Is an Option


Book Description

“Writing this funny requires immense talent.” —AV Club H. Jon Benjamin—the lead voice behind Archer and Bob's Burgers—helps us all feel a little better about our own failures by sharing his own in a hilarious memoir-ish chronicle of failure. Most people would consider H. Jon Benjamin a comedy show business success. But he'd like to remind everyone that as great as success can be, failure is also an option. And maybe the best option. In this book, he tells stories from his own life, from his early days ("wherein I'm unable to deliver a sizzling fajita") to his romantic life ("how I failed to quantify a threesome") to family ("wherein a trip to P.F. Chang's fractures a family") to career ("how I failed at launching a kid's show"). As Jon himself says, breaking down one's natural ability to succeed is not an easy task, but also not an insurmountable one. Society as we know it is, sadly, failure averse. But more acceptance of failure, as Jon sees it, will go a long way to making this world a different place . . . a kinder, gentler place, where gardens are overgrown and most people stay home with their pets. A vision of failure, but also a vision of freedom. With stories, examples of artistic and literary failure, and a powerful can't-do attitude, Failure Is an Option is the book the world doesn't need right now but will get regardless.




The Night of the Triffids


Book Description

In John Wyndham?s classic bestsellerThe Day of the Triffids the world has been overwhelmed by killer plants that have blinded almost the entire population. As the novel ends, Wyndham?s narrator scientist Bill Masen is escaping, with his wife and four-year-old son, to the Isle of Wight where a small colony of survivors is holding out. Simon Clark?s sequels picks up the story twenty-five years on. The survivors are safe, for the time being at least, on their island, where they have continued efforts to combat the triffids, while also striving in various ways to build a new civilization ? in a Mother House, for example, women spend their lives endlessly giving birth. Elsewhere in the world, similar colonies cling to survival, while the triffids persist in their attempts to destroy humanity. One morning Bill Masen?s son, David, now grown up, wakes to a world plunged into darkness. Now, the triffids have an advantage over even sighted humanity. Simon Clark has written an inventive and fast-moving sequel to Wyndham?s story, crafting an elegant and scary tale of humanity?s ongoing fightback against the triffids.




The Overnight


Book Description

A bookstore can be a wonderful, welcoming place of both commerce and curiosity. That's the goal for Woody, an American recently transferred to England to run a branch of Texts. He wants a clean, orderly store and lots of sales to show his bosses when they arrive from the States for a pre-Christmas inspection. Not easy given the shop's location in a foggy strip mall. And things keep going wrong. No matter how often the shelves are put in order before the doors are locked at night, when the staff returns in the morning, books are lying all over the floor, many damp and damaged beyond repair. The store's computers keep acting up-errors appear in brochures and ads and orders disappear completely. And even when the machines are turned off, they seem to glow with a spectral gray light. The hit-and-run death of an employee in the store's parking lot marks a turning point. One employee accuses another of making sexual advances and they come to blows. Between one sentence and the next, one loses his ability to read. The security monitors display half-seen things crawling between the stacks that vanish before anyone can find them. Desperate, Woody musters his staff for an overnight inventory. When the last customers reluctantly depart, leaving almost-visible trails of slime shining behind them, the doors are locked, sealing Woody and the others inside for a final orgy of shelving. The damp, grey, silent things that have been lurking in the basement and hiding in the fog may move slowly, but they are inexorable. This bookstore is no haven. It is the doorway to a hell unlike any other. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




Chocky


Book Description

Matthew's parents are worried. At eleven, he's much too old to have an imaginary friend, yet they find him talking to and arguing with a presence that even he admits is not physically there. This presence - Chocky - causes Matthew to ask difficult questions and say startling things: he speaks of complex mathematics and mocks human progress. Then, when Matthew does something incredible, it seems there is more than the imaginary about Chocky. Which is when others become interested and ask questions of their own: who is Chocky? And what could it want with an eleven-year-old boy?




Night Work


Book Description

There’s nothing moving outside. No cars. No buses. No people. No birds. Nothing. No one. Anywhere. An ordinary man wakes up on an ordinary day to find that he’s the only living creature in the entire city. The radio and TV are suddenly filled with white noise, there’s no newspaper, the Internet is down and no one’s answering the phone. Jonas is the last living being on the planet. What happened? How? Why? And why is he still here? Thriller and philosophical investigation wrapped up in an intensely compelling, eerie mystery, Night Work is compulsive and exhilarating – but don’t read it when you’re all alone...




The Digested Read


Book Description

Literary ombudsman John Crace never met an important book he didn't like to deconstruct. From Salman Rushdie to John Grisham, Crace retells the big books in just 500 bitingly satirical words, pointing his pen at the clunky plots, stylistic tics and pretensions of Big Ideas, as he turns publishers' golden dream books into dross.




Chocky


Book Description

David Gore becomes concerned that his twelve-year-old son, Matthew, is too old to have an imaginary friend. His concerns deepen as Matthew becomes increasingly distressed and blames it on arguments with this unseen companion, whom he calls "Chocky". As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the friend is far from imaginary, but is an alien consciousness communicating with Matthew's mind—a fact that is of interest to shadowy government forces.




Nightshift


Book Description

"Once again, we have arrived at our favorite topic: fraught female friendship. This time it's young women working nights at crappy jobs in 90s London. You'll rip through this, reading through the night, as fixated on the story as Ladner's characters are fixated on each other." —Glamour A riveting debut novel of complex female friendship and obsession, following one young woman’s decision to abandon her normal life and join the otherworldly, nocturnal existence of London’s nightshift workers. RECOMMENDED BY GLAMOUR * NYLON * BUSTLE * THE MILLIONS * LIT HUB * DEBUTIFUL * CRIMEREADS When twenty-three-year-old Meggie meets her distant and enigmatic new coworker Sabine, she recognizes in her the person she would like to be. Meggie is immediately drawn to worldly, beautiful, and uninhibited Sabine; and when Sabine announces she’s switching to the nightshift, Meggie impulsively decides to follow her. Giving up her daytime existence, her reliable boyfriend, and the trappings of a normal life, Meggie finds a liberating sense of freedom as she indulges her growing preoccupation with Sabine and plunges into another existence, immersing herself in the transient and uncertain world of the nightshift worker. While the city sleeps, she passes the hours at work clipping crime stories from the next day’s newspapers. The liminal hours between night and day are spent haunting deserted bars and nightclubs with her eclectic coworkers and going on increasingly wild adventures with Sabine. Yet the closer she gets to Sabine, the more Sabine seems to push her away, leaving Meggie desperately trying to hold on to their intense friendship while doubting if she truly knows her friend at all. A fresh twist on the coming of age story and a dark love letter to city life, Nightshift explores the thin line between self-invention and self-destruction, as Meggie’s sleep deprivation, drinking, and fixation with Sabine gain a momentum all their own. Vividly set in late-nineties London and framed by Meggie’s present-day reflections, Nightshift is a captivating and moving debut that asks profound questions about who we are and if we can truly escape ourselves.