Alternate Fiction

Un jour, vous les humains, vous comprendrez que nous les chats devons prendre votre place. Alors moi, Bastet, je serai votre reine.

Two young women, living centuries apart, both accused of madness, communicate across time to fight a common enemy...their doctors. Emilie begins a secret diary to document her terrifying experience and to maintain her sanity in the asylum for wayward Victorian girls. But when Emilie opens her notebook to find a desperate letter from a young woman, imprisoned within an insane asylum in Victorian England and bearing her own name and description, a portal to another world is blasted wide open.

Considered the first full-length detective novel in the English language, T.S. Eliot described The Moonstone as 'the first and greatest English detective novel'. The stone of the title is an enormous yellow diamond plundered from an Indian shrine after the Siege of Seringapatam. Given to Miss Verinder on her 18th birthday, it mysteriously disappears that very night. Suspicion falls on three Indian jugglers who have been seen in the neighbourhood. Sergeant Cuff is assigned to the case....

For 60 years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the federal district of Sitka, a temporary safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the district is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.

The Virgin Cure begins in the tenements of lower Manhattan in the year 1871. A series of betrayals lead Moth, at only twelve years old, to the wild, murky world of the Bowery, where eventually she meets Miss Everett, the owner of a brothel simply known as "The Infant School." Miss Everett caters to gentlemen who pay dearly for companions who are "willing and clean," and the most desirable of them all are young virgins like Moth.

You, dear listener, continue at your own risk. It is not for the faint of heart - no more so than the study of dragons itself. But such study offers rewards beyond compare: to stand in a dragon's presence, even for the briefest of moments - even at the risk of one's life - is a delight that, once experienced, can never be forgotten….All the world, from Scirland to the farthest reaches of Eriga, know Isabella, Lady Trent, to be the world's preeminent dragon naturalist.

Joe Colsco boarded a flight from San Francisco to Chicago to attend a national chemistry meeting. He would never set foot on Earth again. On planet Anyar, Joe is found unconscious on a beach of a large island inhabited by humans where the level of technology is similar to Earth circa 1700. He awakes amid strangers speaking an unintelligible language and struggles to accept losing his previous life and finding a place in a society with different customs, needing a way to support himself and not knowing a single soul.

The year is 1880. Two hundred years after the trials in Salem, witches Adelaide Thom and Eleanor St Clair finally feel safe and have opened a tea shop in Manhattan, specialising in cures, palmistry and potions. When an enchanting young woman called Beatrice joins the witches as an apprentice, she soon proves indispensable, but her new life is marred by strange occurrences. She sees things no one else can see. She hears voices no one else can hear. Objects appear out of thin air, as if gifts from the dead.

In the early years of the 20th century, a group of female factory workers in Newark, New Jersey, slowly died of radiation poisoning. Around the same time, an Indian elephant was deliberately put to death by electricity in Coney Island. These are the facts. Now these two tragedies are intertwined in a dark alternate history of rage, radioactivity, and injustice crying out to be righted. Prepare yourself for a wrenching journey that crosses eras, chronicling histories of cruelty both grand and petty in search of meaning and justice.

Before World War II could reach its conclusion, the world suffered what could only be defined as a cataclysm. Now, Yosemite City stands as the gateway between two worlds. The empire of humanity to the west, and the wild wastes to the east. Standing at the helm for Yosemite is Vince, a ranger turned city-state ruler. Vince has begun to maneuver through the intricacies of ruling. At the same time he must balance his expanding foundation and fend off external threats.

Like his earlier novel Golden Hill, Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz inhabits a different version of America, now through the lens of a subtly altered 1920s—a fully imagined world filled with fog, cigarette smoke, dubious motives, danger, and dark deeds. In the main character of hard-boiled detective Joe Barrow, we have a hero of truly epic proportions, a troubled soul to fall in love with as you are swept along by a propulsive and brilliantly twisty plot.

When a Tyrannosaurus rex suffers pain from meat trapped between its enormous teeth, a nearby colony of ants risks entering the great creature's maw to make their own repast from the remains of the dinosaur's most recent meal. From this humble beginning, over the course of millennia, a symbiotic civilization achieves amazing advances, facing dangers and exploiting opportunities at every turn.

Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder. She tells police that she is a member of a secret organization devoted to fighting evil; her division is called the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons - "Bad Monkeys" for short. This confession earns Jane a trip to the jail’s psychiatric wing, where a doctor attempts to determine whether she is lying, crazy, or playing a different game altogether.

Ottanger always believed his mutation to be chance or perhaps the actions of fate. Or even the result of pollution on a hellish overpopulated Earth, ruled by a totalitarian Committee and its ruthless Inspectorate. But, when Ottanger is captured, tortured and made the subject of a strange experiment by the Inspectorate, he discovers otherwise - his mutation allows him to walk between alternate worlds. When Ottanger is thrown from his timeline from the far future, he meets the Fenris – humanity’s future form.

When Lord Edgware is found murdered the police are baffled. His estranged actress wife was seen visiting him just before his death and Hercule Poirot himself heard her brag of her plan to "get rid" of him. But how could she have stabbed Lord Edgware in his library at exactly the same time she was seen dining with friends? It's a case that almost proves to be too much for the great Poirot.

Roy Court and his crew are taking the trip of a lifetime—several lifetimes in fact—duplicated and dispatched across the galaxies searching for Earthlike planets. Many possibilities for the future. Yet for Roy, no matter how many of him there are, there’s still just one painful, unchangeable past. In what world can a broken relationship be reborn? The universe is so vast, there’s always room for hope.

Though the Thirty Years' War continues to ravage 17th-century Europe, history as it once happened has been strongly deflected by the new force that is rapidly gathering power and influence: the United States of Europe, an alliance between Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, and the West Virginians from the 20th century, led by Mike Stearns, who were hurled centuries into the past by a mysterious cosmic accident - the Ring of Fire.

Communist China, Japan, Nazi Germany, the United States: they began World War II as mortal enemies. But suddenly their only hope for survival - never mind victory - was to unite to stop a mighty foe: one whose frightening technology appeared invincible. Far worse beings than the Nazis were loose. From Warsaw to Moscow to China's enemy-occupied Forbidden City, the nations of the world had been forced into an uneasy alliance since humanity began its struggle against overwhelming odds.

A freak accident casts Joe Colsco naked onto another planet inhabited by humans with technology circa 1700. In time, Joe, now known as Yozef Kolsko, makes the difficult acceptance of a new life. But he has become embroiled in a struggle beyond any dream he could have had. The Narthani are a militant society intent on subjugating the Caedelli, the people he's come to identify with. Unwittingly, the Narthani themselves are creating an opponent unlike any they have ever faced, an enemy beyond their conceptions.

Major Sharpe finds himself a fugitive, hunted by enemy and ally alike. Major Richard Sharpe awaits the opening shots of the army's campaign with grim expectancy. For victory depends on the increasingly fragile alliance between Britain and Spain - an alliance that must be maintained at any cost. Pierre Ducos, the wily French intelligence officer, sees a chance both to destroy the alliance and to achieve a personal revenge on Richard Sharpe.