Classic Science

Summer 1977. The Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in Oregon's Zoinx River Valley) solved their final mystery and unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster - another low-life fortune hunter trying to get his dirty hands on the legendary riches hidden in Deboën Mansion. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.

The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America, and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.

Imperial law enforcer Amaranthe Lokdon is good at her job: She can deter thieves and pacify thugs, if not with a blade, then by toppling an eight-foot pile of coffee canisters onto their heads. But when ravaged bodies show up on the waterfront, an arson covers up human sacrifices, and a powerful business coalition plots to kill the emperor, she feels a tad overwhelmed. Worse, Sicarius, the empire's most notorious assassin, is in town. He's tied in with the chaos somehow, but Amaranthe would be a fool to cross his path. Unfortunately, her superiors order her to hunt him down.

Captain Telryn “Trip” Yert is on the most important mission of his life. Accompanied by Captain Kaika, the sentient soulblade Jaxi, and Rysha Ravenwood - the noble-born scholar and officer he definitely shouldn’t be developing feelings for - he must find a way to close a portal that’s allowing more and more dragons into the world. If he fails, all of humanity could fall to the powerful creatures. As if that wasn’t enough to worry about, the secret Trip has spent his whole life hiding, that he can draw upon magical power, is on the verge of being discovered.

Farmer Giles of Ham did not look like a hero. He was fat and red-bearded and enjoyed a slow, comfortable life. Then one day a rather deaf and short-sighted giant blundered on to his land. More by luck than skill, Farmer Giles managed to scare him away. The people of the village cheered: Farmer Giles was a hero. His reputation spread far and wide across the kingdom. So it was natural that when the dragon Chrysophylax visited the area it was Farmer Giles who was expected to do battle with it!

The famous Middle English poem by an anonymous Northern England poet is beautifully translated by fellow poet Simon Armitage in this edition. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" narrates in crystalline verse the strange tale of a green knight who rudely interrupts the Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager.

All of us are familiar with the fairy tales of youth where the young hero and heroine fall in love, defeat their enemies, marry, and live happily ever after. The fairy tales gathered here are about what happens next, when the Prince goes bald and the Princess has a midlife crisis. They portray middle-aged men and women facing the special issues dealing with crisis, aging and mortality, and the desire for renewal.

For the first time in a beautiful new edition, this omnibus will collect together the original official novelizations of both Ghostbusters 1 and 2.

James Herriot brings back familiar and much-loved friends, including his partner Siegfried and his most lucrative patient, the delightful Tricki Woo. There are some some new arrivals too, such as the abandoned and terrified mongrol Titch who finds the perfect home with a gruff grocer and feral kittens Olly and Ginny who live in James and wife Helen's back garden. Above all, the veterinary practise in Darrowby is enlivened by a marvelouslly eccentric assistant, Calum Buchanan, who arrives with a pet badger and proceeds to add dogs, owls and a monkey called Mortimer to his growing menagerie.

Capitalism has blessed the world with wealth and technological miracles. It has also cursed it with urban slums, powerless workers, and the vicious boom-and-bust economy. If only there were some way to fix the problems of capitalism and keep all its benefits. In 1897, Henry George published his solution to this puzzle, Progress and Poverty. He suggested that, unlike all other taxes, a tax on land doesn't discourage entrepreneurship. A single tax on land can raise the revenues we need to help the poor without destroying the incentive to create wealth.

Valerius isn't a popular Dark-Hunter - he's a Roman, which means that the largely Greek Hunters have a major grudge against him and his civilization for superceding them. So it serves him right when he runs into Tabitha Devereaux. She's sassy, sexy, and completely unwilling to take him seriously. (Not to mention that she's the twin sister of the wife of former Dark-Hunter Kyrian - Val's mortal enemy.) What Tabitha does take seriously is hunting and killing vampires....

They call me the Spider. I'm the most feared assassin in the South -- when I'm not busy at the Pork Pit cooking up the best barbecue in Ashland. As a Stone elemental, I can hear everything from the whispers of the gravel beneath my feet to the vibrations of the soaring Appalachian Mountains above me. My Ice magic also comes in handy for making the occasional knife. But I don't use my powers on the job unless I absolutely have to. Call it professional pride.

This captivating audiobook will take you on a beautiful journey through the fascinating world of Greek mythology. From the beginning of the cosmos to the Odyssey, be ready to venture into an exciting world of love, loyalty, infidelity, vengeance, deception, and intrigue!

There have been ghosts on the London Underground, sad, harmless specters whose presence does little more than give a frisson to traveling and boost tourism. But now there's a rash of sightings on the Metropolitan Line and these ghosts are frightening, aggressive, and seem to be looking for something. Enter PC Peter Grant, junior member of the Metropolitan Police's Special Assessment Unit, AKA The Folly, AKA the only police officers whose official duties include ghost hunting.

The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son was originally published in the 1953 edition of Essays and Studies. In December of that year, J.R.R. Tolkien took possession of a reel-to-reel tape recorder and, some time during the first few months of 1954, decided to record ‘the whole thing on tape’ as a way of ‘testing’ the performative quality of the dramatic dialogue between Tídwald and Torhthelm.

An inimitable blend of satire, fantasy, and thriller, The Constant Rabbit is the latest dazzlingly original foray into Jasper Fforde's ever-astonishing creative genius. England, 2022. There are 1.2 million human-sized rabbits living in the UK. They can walk, talk, drive cars, and like to read Voltaire, the result of an Inexplicable Anthropomorphising Event 55 years before.

Before being conscripted to fight in the Total War, Private Hector Park had a shattered family, a collection of old video games, and a promising career as a motorcycle stuntman. Now, he is dying from a virus threatening humankind with extinction. He has three days to live. When Hector’s brother contacts him after years of hostile silence, Hector goes to try and make peace. But his brother has an offer even more unbelievable than reconciliation: the chance to cheat death by joining him in Archemi, a full-immersion fantasy VR-RPG video game.

Surviving Lord Darius' attack has put Elorion's level over the top. He must soon leave the Mistress' Labyrinth for the unknown dangers of the Underworld. There are three paths that stand before him. Should he absorb all the Blue Magic he can find, power level his fellow captives, or take on the bone palace alone?

On a bright, summer day, a cyclone suddenly sweeps across the Kansas sky. A young girl named Dorothy and her dog, Toto, are carried up into the terrible storm. Far, far away, they crash down in a strange land called Oz. To return home, Dorothy must travel to the Emerald City and meet the all-powerful Wizard of Oz. But the journey won't be easy, and she'll need the help of a few good friends.

"Philosophy is not a theory," asserted Austro-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), "but an activity." In this 1921 opus, his only philosophical work published during his lifetime, Wittgenstein defined the object of philosophy as the logical clarification of thoughts and proposed the solution to most philosophic problems by means of a critical method of linguistic analysis.