Wall Around A Star


Book Description

He was a reluctant passenger on a voyage to save the galaxy... Butterflylike aliens had brought Earth into the galactic culture. But she was a poor relation, valued only for the living human human bodies she rented out for whatever purposes her nonhuman customers desired. Then Cuckoo was discovered. Millions of miles in diameter, less dense than air, it had a solid surface that was home to many races - including a species of Man. And that was odd, for Cuckoo was from another galaxy! Suddenly, one human, a linguist, became very important. If Jen Babylon could solve the mystery of Cuckoo's records he might raise humanity's standing among the older races - but he might also save the galaxy!




Wall Around a Star


Book Description

Jen Babylon, a linguist, must solve the mystery of the origin of Cuckoo, a huge planet inhabited by alien beings as well as a race of humans




Farthest Star


Book Description

There was no shortage of danger on Cuckoo. 20,000 light years away, the enormous flat surface of Cuckoo travelling at one-sixth the speed of light aimed arrow-straight at the galaxy. Sun One sent the space probe Aurora with a crew of replicates, both human and alien, to intercept. It was a doomed ship. Yet from that mission came Ground Station One, peopled by tachyon transmission, its crew impatient to explore the menace of Cuckoo. Towards them flee a young nomadic wingman, a redbearded giant, and a replicate Ben Yale Pertin intent only on survival, until a frightened girl screams for help...




The Silver Star


Book Description

Two motherless sisters--Bean and Liz--are shuttled to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that's been in their family for generations. When school starts in the fall, Bean easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz becomes increasingly withdrawn. Then something happens to Liz and Bean is left to challenge the injustice of the adult world.




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.




The Walls Around Us


Book Description

SPECIAL PREVIEW! “Ori’s dead because of what happened out behind the theater, in the tunnel made out of trees. She’s dead because she got sent to that place upstate, locked up with those monsters. And she got sent there because of me.” The Walls Around Us is a ghostly story of suspense told in two voices--one still living and one long dead. On the outside, there’s Violet, an eighteen-year-old dancer days away from the life of her dreams when something threatens to expose the shocking truth of her achievement. On the inside, within the walls of a girls’ juvenile detention center, there’s Amber, locked up for so long she can’t imagine freedom. Tying these two worlds together is Orianna, who holds the key to unlocking all the girls’ darkest mysteries. We hear Amber’s story and Violet’s, and through them Orianna’s, first from one angle, then from another, until gradually we begin to get the whole picture--which is not necessarily the one that either Amber or Violet wants us to see. Nova Ren Suma tells a supernatural tale of guilt and innocence, and what happens when one is mistaken for the other. Praise for Imaginary Girls: “A surreal and dreamy world where magical thinking is carried to a chilling extreme.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Praise for 17 & Gone: “Suma’s exquisite sentence-level writing and fine eye for creepy detail are in abundant evidence.” —Kirkus Reviews




Writing on the Wall


Book Description

Chronicles social media over two millennia, from papyrus letters that Cicero used to exchange news across the Empire to today, reminding us how modern behavior echoes that of prior centuries and encouraging debate and discussion about how we'll communicate in the future.




The Silver Star


Book Description

For readers who loved The Glass Castle comes a stunning, heartbreaking novel about an intrepid girl who challenges the injustice of the adult world. It is 1970. 'Bean' Holladay is twelve and her sister Liz fifteen when their mother, a woman who 'flees every place she's ever lived at the first sign of trouble', takes off to find herself. She leaves the girls enough money for food to last a month or two, but it's not long before Bean and Liz board a bus from California to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that has been in the family for generations. Once they've arrived, money is tight, so Liz and Bean start working for Jerry Madox, foreman of the mill in town, a big man who bullies workers, tenants and his wife. Bean adores her whip-smart older sister, inventor of wordgames, reader of Edgar Allan Poe, non-conformist. But when school starts in the autumn, it is Bean who easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz who becomes increasingly withdrawn. And then something happens between Liz and Maddox... 'Tragic and comic at the same time... an outrageous story, one that will break your heart' Sunday Independent 'There isn't a shred of self-pity in this deeply compassionate book' Marie Claire 'Has immense power and readibility... What it does with aplomb is to track the birth of a nation: the conjuring of modern America from a scorched, dusty wasteland' The Times on Half Broke Horses




The Sun Is Also a Star


Book Description

#1 New York Times bestselling author Nicola Yoon is back with her second book, and just like Everything, Everything, it's an instant classic with a love story that's just as intense as Maddy and Olly's--get ready for Natasha and Daniel. This book is inspired by Big History (to learn about one thing, you have to learn about everything). In The Sun is Also a Star, to understand the characters and their love story, we must know everything around them and everything that came before them that has affected who they are and what they experience. Two teens--Daniel, the son of Korean shopkeepers, and Natasha, whose family is here illegally from Jamaica--cross paths in New York City on an eventful day in their lives--Daniel is on his way to an interview with a Yale alum, Natasha is meeting with a lawyer to try and prevent her family's deportation to Jamaica--and fall in love.




The House With a Clock In Its Walls


Book Description

A haunting gothic tale by master mysery writer John Bellairs--soon to be a major motion picture starring Cate Blanchett and Jack Black! "The House With a Clock in Its Walls will cast its spell for a long time."--The New York Times Book Review When Lewis Barnavelt, an orphan. comes to stay with his uncle Jonathan, he expects to meet an ordinary person. But he is wrong. Uncle Jonathan and his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Zimmermann, are both magicians! Lewis is thrilled. At first, watchng magic is enough. Then Lewis experiments with magic himself and unknowingly resurrects the former owner of the house: a woman named Selenna Izard. It seems that Selenna and her husband built a timepiece into the walls--a clock that could obliterate humankind. And only the Barnavelts can stop it!