![]() Virtually every aspect of Chinese social standing, from the government and military to religious orders and remote villages, are woven into the story, each with a role to play as society attempts to adapt and rebuild. Chu's use of Chinese tropes breathes new live into the venerable franchise through its local flavor: Not once are zombies referred to in the text as "walkers," the usual nickname through the franchise, but rather as jiangshi, the Chinese term for life force-consuming undead native to their folklore.Ĭhu takes the same approach with his characters, and more than only his three initial leads. ![]() The novel mixes the beauty of Chinese culture, folklore and cuisine without coming off as pandering, but rather enriches the story to make the inevitable tragedy of burning it all down all the more heartbreaking. ![]() RELATED: Wesley Chu on Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead: TyphoonĬoming primarily from a background as a comedy and science fiction novelist, Chu effortlessly transitions into horror as he takes The Walking Dead into uncharted territory. ![]()
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![]() The Tea Girl and Hummingbird Lane, Lisa See In Fever 1793, Laurie Halse Anderson portrays the implications of surviving a real-life epidemic. But, once Mattie escapes the city, she realizes that the fever is everywhere. ![]() When a fever affects the family of young Mattie Cook in 1793, she must leave her beloved Philadelphia with her grandfather. George Saunders makes the death of Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, into a supernatural take on familial love and the grief that accompanies loss in the Tibetan “bardo,” where ghosts begin a fight over Willie’s very soul. Lincoln in the Bardotells a lesser-known tale of President Lincoln, just after the outset of the Civil War. The novel is a family drama, historical fiction, and romance all rolled into one-and its focus exposes a different side of the historic American experience. ![]() We all know the story of Captain Ahab, but what do we know of his wife? Author Sena Jeter Naslund asks this question in Ahab’s Wife: Or, the Star-Gazer. ![]() Ahab's Wife: Or, the Star-Gazer, Sena Jeter Naslund ![]() ![]() ![]() "An epic drama reminiscent of the best classic Hong Kong gangster films but set in a fantasy metropolis so gritty and well-imagined that you'll forget you're reading a book." -Ken Liu, Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-winning author The outcome of this clan war will determine the fate of all Green Bones - and of Kekon itself. ![]() ![]() When a powerful new drug emerges that lets anyone - even foreigners - wield jade, the simmering tension between the Kauls and the rival Ayt family erupts into open violence. Ancient tradition has little place in this rapidly changing nation. They care about nothing but protecting their own, cornering the jade market, and defending the districts under their protection. Now, the war is over and a new generation of Kauls vies for control of Kekon's bustling capital city. It has been mined, traded, stolen, and killed for - and for centuries, honorable Green Bone warriors like the Kaul family have used it to enhance their magical abilities and defend the island from foreign invasion. Jade is the lifeblood of the island of Kekon. * World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, winner *Named one of TIME's Top 100 Fantasy Books Of All Time In this World Fantasy Award-winning novel of magic and kungfu, four siblings battle rival clans for honor and power in an Asia-inspired fantasy metropolis. ![]() ![]() Who or what was her father? Susan, Merlin, and Vivien must find out, as the Old World erupts dangerously into the New. As he and his sister, the right-handed bookseller Vivien, tread in the path of a botched or covered-up police investigation from years past, they find this quest strangely overlaps with Susan's. ![]() Merlin has a quest of his own, to find the Old World entity who used ordinary criminals to kill his mother. Susan's search for her father begins with her mother's possibly misremembered or misspelt surnames, a reading room ticket, and a silver cigarette case engraved with something that might be a coat of arms. Merlin is a young left-handed bookseller (one of the fighting ones), who with the right-handed booksellers (the intellectual ones), are an extended family of magical beings who police the mythic and legendary Old World when it intrudes on the modern world, in addition to running several bookshops. Crime boss Frank Thringley might be able to help her, but Susan doesn't get time to ask Frank any questions before he is turned to dust by the prick of a silver hatpin in the hands of the outrageously attractive Merlin. In a slightly alternate London in 1983, Susan Arkshaw is looking for her father, a man she has never met. ![]() From the bestselling master of teen fantasy, Garth Nix. A girl's quest to find her father leads her to an extended family of magical fighting booksellers who police the mythical Old World of England when it intrudes on the modern world. ![]() ![]() ![]() Between her father's dangerous obsession with "curing" her girlhood, her best friend suddenly acting like he's entitled to date her, and her fellow superheroes arguing over her place in their ranks, Danny feels like she's in over her head. It should be the happiest time of her life, but Danny's first weeks finally living in a body that fits her are more difficult and complicated than she could have imagined. But before he expired, Dreadnought passed his mantle to her, and those secondhand superpowers transformed Danny's body into what she's always thought it should be. ![]() ![]() Until Dreadnought fell out of the sky and died right in front of her, Danny was trying to keep people from finding out she's transgender. Dreadnought is the superhero adventure we all need right now."-Charlie Jane Anders, author of All the Birds in the Skyĭanny Tozer has a problem: she just inherited the powers of Dreadnought, the world's greatest superhero. "I didn't know how much I needed this brave, thrilling book until it rocked my world. An action-packed series-starter perfect for fans of The Heroine Complex and Not Your Sidekick. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Not only is Mantel a resurrectionist, but also a translator, since she renders her proposal of Cromwell’s life and political achievements available for the reader, transposing the sixteenth-century character into a fascinating hero, who believes in education and justice, and leaves an imprint on history. Thus, to conjure up the dead is Mantel’s main project in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (and in the last novel of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, expected to be released in 2015), a project which has been we 11-received by readers and critics alike. In this sense, Mantel acts as a resurrectionist, or a medium, because she channels communication between the Tudor world and today. 1 In Bring Up the Bodies (2012), Mantel continues her project of rescuing Cromwell from obscurity, but also pays heed to Anne Boleyn, whose protean figure has been the subject of much interpretation. In Wolf Hall (2009) Hilary Mantel breathes life into the character of Thomas Cromwell and centres on his rise to power, from being a lowborn blacksmith’s boy to Cardinal Wolsey’s secretary and lawyer, and later Henry VIII’s minister and adviser. ![]() ![]() ![]() That, moreover, his intellectual faculties are wonderfully exalted and invigourated that his sympathies with the person so impressing Yet perceives, with keenly refined perception, and through channels supposed unknown, matters beyond the scope of the physical organs Those of death, or at least resemble them more nearly than they do the phenomena of any other normal condition within ourĬognizance that, while in this state, the person so impressed employs only with effort, and then feebly, the external organs of sense, There can be no more absolute waste of time than the attempt to prove, at the present day, that man, by mereĮxercise of will, can so impress his fellow, as to cast him into an abnormal condition, of which the phenomena resemble very closely Of these latter, those who doubt, are your mere doubters by profession - an unprofitable andĭisreputable tribe. W HATEVER doubt may still envelop the rationale of mesmerism, its startling facts are nowĪlmost universally admitted. ![]() ![]() ![]() He was even brooding energetically, which is just as well, as he spent a lot of time in sullen contemplation - about his ex-wife, his daughter, his cases, and his past - while listening to weepy alt-folk-rock. In the first episode, which aired this past Sunday on PBS (the next two will air on 23 and 30 October), Jason Isaacs attacked the role of Brodie with the pent-up energy of someone who has spent far too much time in fancy dress as Lucius Mallfoy. Despite lively acting, splashy production values, and rich source material, Case Histories offers precious little genuine detection and a lot of aimless jumping around from case to case and client to client. And with that, he becomes just one more private ‘tec with a wobbly personal life, no head for business, and, of course, the Dark Tragic Secret that has haunted him since childhood. The BBC adaptation of Atkinson’s novels turns Brodie into a conventional private eye, fixed in an office, with a bolshie assistant and a nice view of Victoria Street. ![]() ![]() Existentially adrift, he temporarily touches other people’s lives, but is never fully bound to them. ![]() Her protagonist, Jackson Brodie, who mooches off the page as a kinder, gentler, but no less determined, Jack Reacher, is an essential part of her alchemy. Her skill goes a long way toward disarming the reader’s nagging disbelief that quite so many coincidences would occur in quite so many disparate lives. The charm of Kate Atkinson’s genre-bending crime novels lies in their balancing of the body blows and the grace notes of chance. ![]() ![]() ![]() The “Twilight Company” is the spearhead of the Rebel Alliance, the first ones to engage the enemy and they hate to retreat. There are some few cases engaging into the messy business about being in a battlefield, but even in those cases, it was about Clonetroopers, and if it was about the good guys it was about X-Wing pilots, it’s until now that you have the chance to see the side of the Rebel Alliance foot soldiers, those warriors that they have to face AT-ATs and Stormtrooper legions, at ground level, without the convenient assistance of a Jedi. I say this, since usually almost all Star Wars novels (not matter if old cannon (aka “legends”) or new canon) are about Jedis, Siths, the balance of the Force and stuff related but rarely is about the wars per se. Star Wars: Battlefront – Twilight Company is a rare novel in the universe of Star Wars that ironically it shouldn’t be taking in account that one word in the name of the franchise is indeed “wars”. ![]() But definitely, wars is part of life as sad as it may sound, it shouldn’t be, but it is. Wars is not something that we should glamorize. Wars is a nasty business where no one comes out as victor, not really, both sides in any conflict suffered irreparable losses. A really good book about the “wars” in “Star Wars” ![]() ![]() ![]() When none of the wizards listen, Conn takes matters into his own hands. There is evil afoot in the city of Wellmet, an evil that isn't human.īut Conn is drawn to the murmurs he hears every time he sets off an explosion-something is trying to talk to him, to warn him. ![]() Besides, they have bigger problems to deal with. His master, Nevery, warns him that it could all blow up in his face. In The Magic Thief: Lost, the second book in Sarah Prineas’s acclaimed middle grade fantasy series, wizard’s apprentice Conn is forced to improvise after he loses his locus magicalicus-with explosive results!Ĭonn may only be a wizard's apprentice, but even he knows it's dangerous to play with fire. ![]() |