Visionary Fiction

Curious? This thought-provoking and original novel blends humor, philosophy, science, and history into a captivating story that celebrates the beautiful mess of being human. A novel that promises to touch your heart, make you laugh, and leave you thinking.

Toren Daniels vanished eight months back, and his wife and kids have moved on - with more than a little relief. Toren was a good man but carried a raging temper that often exploded without warning. So when he shows up on their doorstep out of the blue, they're shocked to see him alive. But more shocked to see he's changed. Radically. His anger is gone. He's oddly patient. Kind. Fun. Toren has no clue where he's been but knows he's been utterly transformed. He focuses on three things: Finding out where he's been. Finding out how it happened. And winning back his family.

Many years have passed since the Sanctuary was built as a refuge for the lost. It is just two marble rooms: one for those waiting to be heard and one for the Man Who Listens. Drawn to it are the grieving, the despairing, the cynical, the defeated, the dying, the betrayed, and the broken. They know that the Man Who Listens accepts every blasphemy, every pitiful excuse, and every intimate tale of degradation with silent understanding. Now, 12 new souls are about to seek help for their unimaginable anguish....

Lisa and Elliot have been best friends ever since the day they met as children. Popular, bright and sporty, Lisa was Elliot's biggest supporter when the school bullies made his life a misery, and for that, he will always be grateful. Twenty years later, life has pulled the pair apart, and Lisa is struggling. Her marriage is floundering, her teenage kids are being secretive and she's so tired she can't think straight. So when Elliot knocks on the door, looking much better than she remembers, she can't help but be delighted to see her old friend again.

After losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he sees a clip from a lost film by the silent comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to study the works of this mysterious figure who vanished from sight in 1929.

Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and budding messiah, has hit a spiritual wall. In midtour he bolts from his band to hole up in a dingy East Village apartment and separate himself from the paranoid machine that propels the culture he has helped create. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling farce he is trying to escape.

Learn how this monk learns to think outside the box. Come along with him as he fights the temptation of an old flame and a dictatorial abbot.

Lucy is a lapsed Catholic whose adolescent pretentions to sainthood are unexpectedly revived. It all starts when her cousin Zoltan, in hospital following a bizarre incident at a party, offers her a disturbing deathbed confession. Lucy's grief takes an unusual turn: Zoltan's death appears to have turned her into a magnet for the unshriven. Lucy is transformed into a self-described "flesh-and-blood Wailing Wall" as strangers unburden themselves to her. She becomes addicted to the dark stories and finds herself jonesing for hit after hit.

Hannah Skye, a young woman in search of meaning, receives a cryptic letter from her missing and eccentric Aunt Jewelia. Her experience of a recurring powerful pumpkin patch dream unfolds into a spiritual journey to a mysterious island of eternal autumn, Maple Hollow, where she discovers the mystical Skye Manor and her magickal family legacy.

Troubled by an inability to find any meaning in his life, the 25-year-old narrator of this deceptively simple novel quits university and eventually arrives at his brother's New York apartment. In a bid to discover what life is all about, he writes lists. He becomes obsessed by time and whether it actually matters. He faxes his meteorologist friend. He endlessly bounces a ball against the wall. He befriends a small boy who lives next door. He yearns to get to the bottom of life and how best to live it.

When a repairman accidentally finds a parallel universe, everyone sees it as an opportunity, whether as a way to ease Earth’s overcrowding, set up a personal kingdom, or hide an inconvenient mistress. But when a civilization is found already living there, the people on this side of the crack are sent scrambling to discover their motives. Will these parallel humans come in peace, or are they just as corrupt and ill-intentioned as the people of this world?

Liza, an orphan girl living on the cold streets of London in 1834, is able to rise above her squalid surroundings to bring joy to the lives of others. Although only 11, she displays amazing courage as she cares for a younger child and ekes out a bare existence through the approaching winter, guided by the wisdom embodied in letters left to her by her mother. When Liza meets a wealthy gentleman, her mysterious, almost magical manner causes him to re-examine his own life.

Fierce. Audacious. Independent. Curtis Ash can't be bothered to settle down. He's too busy enjoying his cushy job as a high-paid stylist, caught in a whirlwind of hookups, parties, and obscenely priced cocktails. The only snarl in an otherwise charmed life is the salon's hotshot colorist, Red Turner. Not only does Red put the whammy on customers and rake in all the big tips, he's oblivious to Crash's flirtation. But there will be plenty of time to win him over - or so Crash thinks.

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. What happens when his idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting.

When Lily, a little girl with psychic abilities, is terrorized by Shadow People, she and her family seek the help of experienced psychic medium Edith MacKenzie. Together they navigate portals, vortexes, time travel, and encounter Ancient Egyptian Gods who help them open a Stargate to rid the Earth of a dark entity brought forth by a military experiment gone terribly wrong.

An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what connects him to a jazz buff in Tokyo? A woman on a holy mountain talks to a tree, and the tree talks back. Add to this a Mongolian gangster, an English spy, a despondent "zookeeper", a nuclear scientist, a ghostwriter, a ghost, and a late night New York DJ. All of them have tales to tell, and all must play their part as they are caught up in the inescapable forces of cause and effect.

Booklist calls the world of Hugo Award winner Elizabeth Bear’s spellbinding Jacob’s Ladder series “magnificently populated, well worth visiting.” Here the trilogy that began with Dust and Chill draws to its stunning conclusion. The passengers of the generation spaceship Jacob’s Ladder have found a new home at last. But the planet Grail is already inhabited - and its population of genetically engineered humans has no intention of sharing the world.

Hugo Award winner Elizabeth Bear has won high praise for her thought-provoking science fiction. The second in Bear’s powerful Jacob’s Ladder series, Chill finds the generation starship Jacob’s Ladder with a new captain—Perceval. As Perceval struggles with the ship’s recent damage, remnants of the rebellion still linger and a threat to the crew grows.

At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott; and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover - and Bill's.

Wherever he goes, the Dreamseller enchants, stirs up trouble, and inspires his listeners to search for the most important thing: the heart of the human soul. Every person he meets is someone who has abandoned their dreams and is struggling through life: a professor who has stopped pursuing his passions; a lonely alcoholic with no family; the elderly who have lost their zest for life. Through his wisdom, the Dreamseller helps them to look into their silent hearts and get to the root of their unhappiness.