Knock Before You Enter

Knock Before You Enter

D. A. Bale

Literature & Fiction / Mystery & Thrillers / Science Fiction & Fantasy

Your favorite bartender is headed on vacation - and this time it isn't all high heels and handsome hunks.Try gators, a grandmother, and GOLD!The De'Laruse matriarch carries a secret from the Civil War era, and it's high time to tear down the accompanying rumor mill. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, French gold was captured when the ship aiding the Confederacy tried to run the Union blockade. Addie enlists the help of Vicki Bohanan and her granddaughter, best bud Janine De'Laruse, to decode the clues left in a Union soldier's journal to solve the mystery once and for all concerning what happened to the bars emblazoned with the fleur-de-lis imprint.As if Vicki doesn't have enough concerns to occupy her week. Between fighting off Janine's oversexed younger brother, a mysterious maid of questionable conduct, and the sperm donor breathing down her neck - not to mention those grumpy gators again - all Vicki wants is one uninterrupted night's sleep.Fat chance - even in the land...
Read online
  • 5
My Very UnFairy Tale Life

My Very UnFairy Tale Life

Anna Staniszewski

Literature & Fiction / Children's Books / Science Fiction & Fantasy

"You know all those stories that claim fairies cry sparkle tears and elves travel by rainbow? They're lies. All lies." Twelve-year-old Jenny has spent the last two years as an adventurer helping magical kingdoms around the universe. But it's a thankless job, leaving her no time for school or friends. She'd almost rather take a math test than rescue yet another magical creature! When Jenny is sent on yet another mission, she has a tough choice to make: quit and have her normal life back, or fulfill her promise and go into a battle she doesn't think she can win.
Read online
  • 5
Island in the Sun

Island in the Sun

Alec Waugh

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction / Biographies & Memoirs

To the casual visitor Santa Marta is a sub-tropical paradise, a small sister of Jamaica, Bermuda and Nassau, unmentioned in the colour-splashed brochures of travel agents: an island where the sun shines throughout the year on the sandy beaches of innumerable coves, on the cane-fields and coconut plantations, on the shingled hits of the peasant villages and the fine houses of the white planters handed down through generation after generation, from the Sugar Barons of a past century. But this was not how the newspaper columnist, Bradshaw, saw it when he arrived on his first trip to the Caribbean. Bradshaw found Santa Marta a smoldering volcano.This novel is a brilliantly successful evocation of the atmosphere and the problems of life on a West Indian island. It is a dramatic story, packed with incident and thrilling in tis mounting tension. It weaves into the fortunes of a small group of islanders the ambitions and jealousies, the hopes and fears, the complexes and inhibitions...
Read online
  • 5


Hidden History

Hidden History

Melody Carlson

Literature & Fiction / Young Adult

While giving the laundry room of Grace Chapel Inn a thorough cleaning, Alice Howard finds an old hatbox containing her father's journal from the early 1900s. As she reads it aloud each evening to her sisters Louise and Jane they discover fascinating events their beloved father had never even hinted at. With Alice dressing up for a change, Jane concocting delicious new recipes for the inn's guests and Louise knitting a beautiful pink sweater—for a pig—the sisters move through the one year anniversary of their father's death with a deeper love and appreciation for their life together.
Read online
  • 5
The Blazing World: A Novel

The Blazing World: A Novel

Siri Hustvedt

Literature & Fiction / Poetry

With The Blazing World, internationally best­selling author Siri Hustvedt returns to the New York art world in her most masterful and urgent novel since What I Loved. Hustvedt, who has long been celebrated for her “beguiling, lyrical prose” (The Sunday Times Books, London), tells the provocative story of the artist Harriet Burden. After years of watching her work ignored or dismissed by critics, Burden conducts an experiment she calls Maskings: she presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity. The three solo shows are successful, but when Burden finally steps forward triumphantly to reveal herself as the artist behind the exhibitions, there are critics who doubt her. The public scandal turns on the final exhibition, initially shown as the work of acclaimed artist Rune, who denies Burden’s role in its creation. What no one doubts, however, is that the two artists were intensely involved with each other. As Burden’s journals reveal, she and Rune found themselves locked in a charged and dangerous game that ended with the man’s bizarre death. Ingeniously presented as a collection of texts compiled after Burden’s death, The Blazing World unfolds from multiple perspectives. The exuberant Burden speaks—in all her joy and fury—through extracts from her own notebooks, while critics, fans, family members, and others offer their own conflicting opinions of who she was, and where the truth lies. From one of the most ambitious and interna­tionally renowned writers of her generation, The Blazing World is a polyphonic tour de force. An intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle, it explores the deceptive powers of prejudice, money, fame, and desire. Emotionally intense, intellectually rigorous, ironic, and playful, Hustvedt’s new novel is a bold, rich masterpiece, one that will be remembered for years to come.
Read online
  • 5
Untold Adventures

Untold Adventures

John Shirley

Literature & Fiction / Science Fiction & Fantasy / Horror

Your favorite award-winning, critically acclaimed, and best-selling authors unite to tell stories set in the Dungeons & Dragons world, filled with desperate dragons and cruel elves, honorable demons and fickle gods, wild magic and the sharpest of steel. You don't want to miss this rarest of opportunities to get a glimpse into the D&D adventures created by some of the most brilliant fantasy writers of our age.From the Paperback edition.
Read online
  • 5
Paris: The Novel

Paris: The Novel

Edward Rutherfurd

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

From the grand master of the historical novel comes a dazzling, epic portrait of the City of Light Internationally bestselling author Edward Rutherfurd has enchanted millions of readers with his sweeping, multigenerational dramas that illuminate the great achievements and travails throughout history. In this breathtaking saga of love, war, art, and intrigue, Rutherfurd has set his sights on the most magnificent city in the world: Paris. Moving back and forth in time across centuries, the story unfolds through intimate and vivid tales of self-discovery, divided loyalties , passion, and long-kept secrets of characters both fictional and real, all set against the backdrop of the glorious city—from the building of Notre Dame to the dangerous machinations of Cardinal Richlieu; from the glittering court of Versailles to the violence of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune; from the hedonism of the Belle Époque, the heyday of the impressionists, to the tragedy of the First World War; from the 1920s when the writers of the Lost Generation could be found drinking at Les Deux Magots to the Nazi occupation, the heroic efforts of the French Resistance, and the 1968 student revolt. With his unrivaled blend of impeccable research and narrative verve, Rutherfurd weaves an extraordinary narrative tapestry that captures all the glory of Paris. More richly detailed, more thrilling, and more romantic then anything Rutherfurd has written before, Paris: The Novel wonderfully illuminates hundreds of years in the City of Light and Love and brings the sights, scents, and tastes of Paris to sumptuous life.
Read online
  • 5