Halley's Comet night at Winterscombe in 1910 ends with a violent death which throws a giant shadow over three generations of the Cavendish dynasty. At the centre of events is the beautiful and dangerous Constance, who casts a spell - which may be a curse - on all the sons of the family. Following the destruction of two World Wars - and the passions, deceits and hatreds of the intervening peace - it is the coruscating power of Constance's personality, and the sinister secret at the heart of her life, which will determine if Victoria, last of the Cavendishes, is to inherit happiness or misery.

Sometimes the miracles you were praying for were there all along... Italy, 1136 Norman-born Elys de Wix fills her time with embroidery on the long pilgrimage to Rome to pray for healing of brother's injury. She never thought much of it, until their new traveling companion, Saxon master-mason Aylwin, admires her skill. While not as handsome and diverting as Sir Fulk, when Elys is dreading entering a nunnery, it is Aylwin who whispers a solution: she could make a living from her embroidery. On her return to England, Elys finds her brother Matthew living in Waltham, a little church known for its miracles. She has always known her calling was to be a mother, not a nun, but with her dowry already paid to the nuns, Elys will need a miracle of her own to find a husband, or someone who believes in her needlework, to keep her out of the cloister walls. With glorious historical detail of Medieval Christian life and the crafting of...

As a vicar's daughter, quiet Penelope Carlisle is accustomed to living on the thin edge of poverty. She's content with her small home and a friendly village—until a cloaked and crippled Beast rides into her orchard. Badly scarred in heart and soul, Viscount Graham Trevelyan has no use for love. He has a need for revenge and a child to protect. The compassionate innocent who doesn't flee his fierce visage is the perfect mother his silent daughter needs. Penelope understands the wisdom of a marriage of convenience to save her home. But how can she protect her heart from the gruff man who shows her kindness, only to keep her at a distance? And how long can Graham stay away from a courageous woman who dares tell him when he's wrong—and threatens to desert him should he continue down his dangerous path?

Hanumān, the red-faced monkey chief and ninth grammarian of Hindu mythology, is the protagonist of this dazzling narrative--a mind-journey to the temple city of Galta in India and the occasion for Octavio Paz, the celebrated Mexican poet and essayist, to explore the origin of language, the nature of naming and knowing, time and reality, and fixity and decay. *Selected Review:The very concept of grammar - a system in which language can be fixed, structured and therefore transformed - is one of the great achievements of Indian culture. In the past 50 years philosophers and linguists have devoted enormous intellectual energies to the investigation of how the concept was developed among the thinkers of ancient India, for whom the idea became a central problem in their philosophical tradition. Was language, our faculty for naming objects, given by God or did man invent it, either on his own or with powers borrowed from the divine realm? Through a species of time-space journey akin to Hanuman's, Octavio Paz explores this dilemma: ''What is language made of,'' he asks, ''and most important of all, is it already made, or is it something that is perpetually in the making?'' (New York Times)*About the Author:Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was born in Mexico City. He wrote many volumes of poetry, as well as a prolific body of remarkable works of nonfiction on subjects as varied as poetics, literary and art criticism, politics, culture, and Mexican history. He was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1977, the Cervantes Prize in 1981, and the Neustadt Prize in 1982. He received the German Peace Prize for his political work, and finally, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.About the Translator:Helen Lane was the preeminent translator of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian fiction. Among the long list of authors she translated are Augusto Roa Bastos, Jorge Amado, Luisa Valenzuela, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marguerite Duras, Nélinda Piñon, and Curzio Malaparte.

Admirers of The Spanish Temper, Marching Spain and his wonderfully evocative books on London, Dublin and New York will need no reminding that V.S. Pritchett is one of the very great travel writers of our time, possessed of an astonishingly accurate eye and a marvellous ability to conjure up the essence of a place, and of the people who live there.Written for the most part in the 1950s and 1960s, the essays brought together in At Home and Abroad cover South and North America, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, London, Greece, the Pyrenees, Germany, the English countryside and, above all, the Mediterranean: first published in book form in 1990, the year of Sir Victor's ninetieth birthday, they are a delight in themselves and a timely reminder of—or introduction to—this most subtle and perceptive of writers.

No matter what strange forms the future takes, says Ben Bova in his introduction, crime and criminals will always be with us--and with them, the need for law enforcement. Included with many other stories are the full-length novel City of Darkness and "Brillo"--the famous collaboration between Bova and Harlan Ellison.Table of ContentsCity of DarknessVince’s DragonBrillo by Harlan Ellison and Ben BovaOut of TimeTest in OrbitStars, Won’t You Hide Me?Diamond SamEscape!

Now a private detective in the Chicago suburb of Foxport, Quint investigates the apparent suicide of a judge who had just been indicted on bribery charges. The judge's widow stands to lose a sizeable insurance policy if Quint can't prove it was murder. And she asks so nicely.

In this stunning novel, Dori Sanders tells a story of black-white relationships like no other ever written, as seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl who is bound to become one of the most apppealing and memorable characters in literature.

IN THE DESOLATE REACHES OF NEVADA, ONE MAN GUARDS A BRUTAL SECRET...AND HE'LL KILL FOR IT. AT A PLUSH MOUNTAIN RETREAT, LIFE IS A PLEASURE. THE PRICE IS MURDER. The Deer Creek Condos are delightfully secluded, an ultra-luxury development nestled in the mountains above Las Vegas's garish, billion-dollar carnival. There are only nine apartments, one to a floor. The owners are rich, successful and cultured, enjoying the finest of everything, with the best security money can buy... Now a violent winter avalanche has trapped them in the wilderness. And the residents of Deer Creek are dying, in fatal accidents that add up to homicide. Only a handful of them are left--neighbors, friends, lovers--and a old, obsessive killer. Someone whose job is death. Someone who knows every way there is to snuff a human life... cover art Ron Barbagallo

When the Viking lander on the planet Minerva was destroyed, sending back one last photo of a strange alien being, scientists on Earth were flabbergasted. And so a joint investigation was launched by the United States and the Soviet Union, the first long-distance manned space mission, and a symbol of the new peace between the two great rivals. Humankind's first close encounter with extraterrestrials would be history in the making, and the two teams were schooled in diplomacy as well as in science. But nothing prepared them for alien war -- especially when the Americans and the Soviets found themselves on opposite sides...