Urban Historical

In a walled city of a mile-high iron guild towers, many things are common knowledge: No book in any of the city's libraries reveals its place on a calendar or a map. No living beasts can be found within the city's walls. And no good comes to the guilder or foundling who trespasses too far from their labors. Even on the tower rooftops, where Errol Thebes and the rest of the city's teenagers pass a few short years under an open sky, no one truly believes anything uncommon is possible within the city walls.

Berlin 1989: David Hasselhoff (Erzähler) ist für seine "Looking for Freedom"-Tour in Berlin. Ebenfalls in der Stadt ist CIA-Agent Nick Harper, der David zum Verwechseln ähnlich sieht. Er soll Stasi-General Hoedel finden, bevor dieser den Mauerfall verhindern kann. Doch kurz nach dem Grenzübertritt wird Nick von Stasi-Agenten überrascht und entkommt nur, weil ihn Hasselhoff-Fan Hildy, die ihn für ihr großes Idol hält, stolz in ihrem Trabi mit nach Hause nimmt. Parallel dazu wird der echte David Hasselhoff von CIA-Agentin Greta mit Nick Harper verwechselt.

Scented by chocolate and haunted by war, this compelling novel of dark miracles and angelic visitations offers up a distinctly imaginative tale. Marie Claire is a young French Jew in a Nazi-occupied Belgiantown, where she is cared for by her grandmother, who cultivates flowers. A shattering of glass, and Marie Claire's village is in rubble. Her grandmother is dead - everyone is dead. She flees to the root cellar of the house and waits.

At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Rose’s suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village. Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain the men in their lives....

"Die Tumanbay-Saga" beginnt: Der Auftakt einer fesselnden Reihe, basierend auf dem preisgekrönten BBC-Podcast. Willkommen in Tumanbay – einer Stadt, in der Dolche regieren. Einer Stadt, in der aus Sklaven Regenten werden. Einer Stadt, die von Männern geführt und von Frauen zerschmettert wird. Und alles beginnt an dem Tag, als der Sultan einen abgetrennten Kopf als Geschenk einer Königin erhält. Was er nicht ahnt: Maya, die selbsternannte Rebellenfürstin, hält Tumanbay schon längst in ihrem unsichtbaren Griff.

The Beetle tells the tale of an evil, ancient Egyptian spirit seeking revenge on an up-and-coming British politician, Paul Lessingham. The shape-shifting creature that pursues Lessingham is possessed of hypnotic powers and takes different forms, both male and female, as well as morphing into a beetle - a figure that induces terror in its victims.

Does size matter? Is bigger better? That’s no small question to Tom Little - the circus midget with giant dreams. Tom may be king of the midgets, but he’s got far grander ambitions - to become the muscleman at the top, the ringmaster. Now, drawing on some dark ancient secrets and mystic texts, he’s about to get his wish.... Assuming another man’s identity, Tom discovers he must also take on his sins, debts, and enemies. He may be living large - but now there are those who want to make him pay for the big man’s sins.

Nelson Mandela is well known throughout the world as a heroic leader who symbolizes freedom and moral authority. He is fixed in the public mind as the world’s elder statesman - the gray-haired man with a kindly smile who spent 27 years in prison before becoming the first Black president of South Africa. But Nelson Mandela was not always elderly or benign....

Hazel's parents saw the 1912 sinking of the Titanic as a portent of doom and locked their daughter away. Isolated and alone, each birthday she wishes to be free, whatever the risk. If only her childhood friend, Henry, would return and breach the high walls. On the front lines of the Great War, Henry kept a token of happier times - a worn photograph of a young girl with long blonde plaits. He returns from war damaged and vowing to do one brave thing to make up for his cowardice: release Hazel from her prison.

In this coming-of-age novel, I discover a life-changing point of view, BAGO. Frustrated by unanswered questions at a religious school in Southwest Philadelphia, that I was punished for asking, I set out to become a famous pirate by making a movie of my Huckleberry Finn river adventure, with extraordinarily surprising results.

Nur um Haaresbreite ist Athen 480 vor Christus einer Katastrophe entgangen – dank der todesmutigen Krieger aus Sparta, die den Pass bei den Thermophylen lange genug gehalten hatten, um die Stadt zu evakuieren.

Willkommen in Tumanbay, einst der Sitz eines mächtigen Sultans - jetzt liegt die Stadt in Ketten. Denn der Herrscher über Tumbay ist tot, sein gefürchtetes Heer wurde vernichtet. Nun regiert eine Frau die prächtigste Stadt der Welt, die geheimnisumwitterte Königin Maya. Doch wo ist die grausame Feldherrin, und warum zeigt sich Maya den Unterworfenen nicht? Während sich die mächtigsten Männer der Stadt vor dem fanatischen Maya-Kult in Sicherheit bringen, regt sich Widerstand. Denn der Thron von Tumanbay ist kein Machtsitz, er gleicht eher einem Todesurteil.

These stories provide you with an invitation to traverse the boundaries of the known and unknown, to question reality as you know it, and to confront your deepest fears and desires. With each tale, you are transported into a different world, a different time, a different reality. From historical mysteries steeped in the supernatural to thrilling tales of science fiction, the Anthology of Strange Stories is your passport to the unimaginable.

Judith Jonson has been a widow for five years. At first, she hoped Dan would return, but her dream turned to a nightmare as the war ended, and she had to accept her beloved husband was never coming home. Then one day she sees a picture in the paper - the aftermath of a dramatic robbery in London's West End - and Judith can't believe her eyes. It's Dan, she'd stake her life on it - or rather his life, the traitor. Betrayed and desperate for answers, Judith begins a hunt for the man she thought she married. And in amongst the lowlifes of the East End's gangland underworld she finds more than she bargained for.

Abigail Argent stands out. Some people notice that she always wears gloves and shudder when they know why. The ones who know her best notice her ability with metal. Abigail's particular talent lies in the coloring of alloys, for seeing the beauty in a plain piece of metal and being able to draw it out. Her study leads her to discover a connection between her own craft and that of her favorite childhood myth: changing lead into gold.

The man couldn't help himself. His captor was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her powerful eyes held his attention and made him forget that she had him confined in a basement, his hands and feet bound with duct tape. She fed him when he was hungry and kept him alive for the telling of her horrific tale. After getting past the terror and discomfort, he reasoned that there was nothing to worry about for the moment.

When the high sovereign of the rapidly industrializing realm of Ghavarim is murdered by a mysterious assassin, the rulers of the five kingdoms of the Federation are plunged into a vicious power struggle. Jason Tern, a noble captain from the borderlands, must battle shadowy half-human assailants with limbs of brass and steel while untangling an ever-widening web of lies and intrigue to discover the true identity of the killer before mounting tensions spark a bloody civil war.

Vampires around the world are coming forth to remind humans they are not romantic fantasies to be sought, nor are they should that can be redeemed. These are the stories that they must tell. The first novella in a series of 12, Anne Fitzgerald gives the tale of her involvement in the Irish gangs in the 1930s and her transformation into the Wyandot's vampiric legend of the hooh-strah-dooh. Her tale is a hard one to tell, with love, loss, and abuse plaguing her past. But she must tell it so that humans know the truth. That the world of the vampire is one of suffering.

Parigi, 1940. La città è occupata dai nazisti. Il lussuoso Hotel Ritz, un tempo frequentato dall'alta società parigina, è adesso alla mercé di arroganti ufficiali tedeschi, con un ossequioso seguito di tirapiedi e accompagnatrici. Olivia Olsen è una delle cameriere dell'hotel. È americana, ma tiene nascosta la sua nazionalità, anche se questa bugia diventa ogni giorno più pericolosa. Quando un uomo molto vicino a Hitler mette gli occhi su di lei, Olivia non esita a cogliere l'opportunità per dare una mano ai partigiani.

Oliver Caradog saves a small boy from a white dragon. Unable to find his family and suspecting him to be not entirely human, he names him Jude and takes him home to be cared for by his wife in the realm of the tyrant King Vortigern. This is a fantasy fiction short story based on the real history of Wales, a beautiful and wild country where dragons have always lived.