Max is an eight-year-old boy whose family has just moved into an old farmhouse in Yorkshire. He discovers some old toy soldiers in the attic and is surprised and delighted to find that they come to life. The soldiers, known as the Twelves, or the Young Men, have different personalities; they are brave, intelligent and very independent, not to mention argumentative. They adopt Max as one of their Genii, or protective spirits, and he begins to spend most of his time watching and thinking about them. He learns from the local parson that they once belonged to the Brontës, who wrote stories about their adventures. When his older sister Jane discovers the secret, she becomes as keen on the soldiers as Max is. The local newspaper publishes a letter about the Brontë wooden soldiers, from an American professor offering £5,000 (at the time a small fortune) to anyone who finds them. Max and Jane''s older brother Philip believes the Morley soldiers may be the Brontë ones, and impulsively writes to the professor about them — only to deeply regret his act when he too discovers the truth. The soldiers learn that they are in danger of being taken to America and disappear in the night. The children have some anxious moments before they discover that the soldiers have determined to return to their original home in Haworth, now a museum dedicated to the Brontës. Their march across the countryside is fraught with peril, but they finally reach safe haven with the protection of the Genii.

The Twelve and the Genii

We find out at the start of the novel that in the previous book the Soul Eaters marked Torak with the Soul Eater symbol. This is discovered and Torak is set to be cast out from the clans, unless his own clan, the Wolf Clan, decides he is innocent. When the Wolf Clan arrives, the Leader says that his mother announced him ''Clanless''. This has never happened before, but as Torak has no clan to decide his innocence, he becomes an outcast. He leaves the clans with Wolf. Renn repeatedly tries to help him, but Torak won''t let her as if anyone sees Torak they are supposed to kill him. Torak attempts to cut out the Soul Eater mark from his chest and, thinking it has worked, he goes back to the Raven Camp and watches them. Saeunn, the Raven Clan''s mage, says that there is a Soul Eater among them, so Torak flees, knowing that he is the Soul Eater of which she speaks. While in hiding, he suffers from a kind of madness called soul sickness, and attackes Wolf with fire. Meanwhile, Renn and Bale meet up and decide to find Torak and prove his innocence, even though in doing so they are breaking clan law. Renn sends help to Torak in the form of two ravens (named Rip and Rek by Torak). While Torak is recovering his reason, Seshru the Viper Mage, a Soul Eater, uses her powers to draw him to her so as to control him (he is a Spirit Walker and therefore controlling him would supply her with even greater power). Seshru is revealed to be Renn''s mother. Meanwhile, Renn realizes that a giant flood is coming and encourages Torak to spread the word and therefore prove his innocence. Torak therefore tells Fin-Kedinn, and the clans flee. Torak gets into a fight with a boy from the Boar Clan, but then climbs up a tree to escape the coming flood. The Boar Clan boy hears the water coming and tries to climb the tree too, but he cannot reach the first branch so Torak jumps down to help him. Torak then finds he cannot climb back up the tree, and he and Wolf are swept away by the water. When he wakes up, all the clans are there, and when Seshru appears Torak shows the clans that destroying him will not help them in their struggle against the Soul Eaters, and they accept him back. Bale uses Renn''s bow to kill Seshru, and she dies with the fire opal in hand and thus both die as one. fr:Le Banni (Chroniques des temps obscurs)

Outcast

Bianca Olivier is a new student to Evernight Academy, a Gothic boarding school with "perfect" but predatory students. She knows she does not belong but she cannot escape because her parents are now teachers at the school. Bianca believes the best of her parents and trusts them about everything even when her brain tells her not to. As school progresses, Bianca befriends Lucas, Raquel, a loner like her, and Vic, Lucas''s roommate. She develops enemies, like Courtney and Erich, who are what Bianca calls "The Evernight Type". At a party, she befriends a handsome, popular, but friendly guy, Balthazar More. Balthazar asks her to the Autumn Ball. There, she, Lucas and Balthazar get into an argument, and Balthazar leaves them alone. Outside, under the gazebo, she and Lucas kiss for the first time. Bianca gives in to temptation, bites Lucas and drinks his blood. After she realizes what she did, she screams for help. Upon hearing, Courtney comes out and says "Well, it''s about time you became a vampire like the rest of us." When Lucas awakens he is unable to remember the event. Lucas and Bianca declare their love for each other. Lucas eventually discovers Bianca is a vampire, but she is a child of two vampires and he accepts this. After they have been officially dating for weeks, Bianca mentions that one of Lucas''s ancestors went to Evernight, but no humans have ever been accepted to the school before, except a Black Cross member (a group of elite vampire hunters). Her parents and Balthazar realize this and attack, but Lucas holds his own against two vampires and they chase him off campus. Bianca runs off with him, and even though he has been raised to hate all vampires, he still loves Bianca. They meet up with the rest of his team, and the Black Cross think that she is a stolen baby, hiding the truth she is a vampire. Bianca''s parents turn up and take her back home because they do not understand. She reluctantly goes with them. A few days later she receives a letter through Vic from Lucas telling her that he will always love her and they will meet again.

Evernight

Shapely starlet Nola Norton finds a gimmick to get the attention of a major Hollywood studio. At a beautiful Southern California beach she pretends to be drowning and lures lifeguard Eddie Baker into deep water. In circumstances that completely disorient Eddie, Nola uses a concealed underwater breathing device, constructed for her by Eddie''s supervisor, to hold Eddie underwater until he passes out. She then contrives to rescue him, which gains her the press she''s been seeking, but effectively costs Eddie his career. When Eddie learns that his rescuer has landed a $150,000 studio contract on the strength of the publicity he unwittingly helped her gain, he determines to claim a share of the money for himself. He uncovers the connection between Nola and his supervisor, Hank Sawyer, now dead under mysterious circumstances. He determines that Nola and her sleazy theatrical agent, Joe Lamb, murdered Hank not only because of his complicity in the lucrative publicity stunt, but also because of what he knew about Nola''s past as a teen-age prostitute in San Diego—the kiss of death for an aspiring Hollywood star. Armed with this information— and enough material evidence to hang Nola in both the criminal justice system and the court of public opinion—Hank offers Nola a "business proposition" which falls little short of blackmail. Varied games of cat-and-mouse ensue, in which Nola unsuccessfully uses her charms to neutralize Eddie''s assault on her income. Meanwhile, Joe Lamb convinces his vivacious, red-headed associate Carol Taylor to become involved in tracking Eddie to his desert hiding place. There Eddie and Carol become more than just friends. When Joe accompanies Carol to her next rendezvous with Eddie, he pulls a gun and takes steps to put Eddie out of the way, as he and Nola did with Hank Sawyer. Surprised and horrified, Carol steps in on Eddie''s behalf and accidentally shoots and kills Joe. Eddie takes extraordinary risks to dispose of Joe''s body in a way that will not implicate himself or the distraught Carol. While this seems to put the police off the scent, back in Los Angeles Nola puts the pieces together and threatens to expose Eddie as Joe''s murderer. With the stakes this high, a showdown is inevitable. Eddie tracks Nola and her movie-star beau to a yacht off the shores of Catalina Island, where once more murder hangs in the night air. Eddie finds Nola a formidable adversary to the end, as the novel comes to its explosive conclusion.

Built for Trouble

James Caplon Answell arranges to visit his future father-in-law, Avory Hume, at his house in London. Hume invites the prospective bridegroom into his strong room that is fitted with sturdy metal shutters and a thick wooden door. The room contains trophies and arrows that relate to Hume''s hobby of archery, and they chat about archery while Hume pours drinks from a cut-glass decanter. As Answell collapses, he realizes that the drink has been drugged. When he comes to, he''s alone in the locked and bolted room with Hume, who has been fatally skewered with an arrow. The remainder of the novel takes place at Answell''s trial for the murder of Hume, and he is being defended by barrister and amateur detective Sir Henry Merrivale. We learn that Hume has set the actions of the plot in motion because he believes that he is having an interview not with the wealthy and blameless man who wants to marry his daughter, but a similarly named relative, Captain Answell, who is blackmailing her (and in a plot development that is extremely frank for the mores of 1938, she is being blackmailed because she posed for "obscene" photographs for her lover). Hume''s household has participated to some extent in the activities that have conspired to make Answell look guilty. The decanter with the drugged drink has been replaced with an innocuous duplicate, and some mysteriously disappearing items include a suitcase full of clothing and an ink-pad. But it is the location of a tiny piece of blue feather from the fatal arrow that proves to be the decisive clue that reveals the murderer—it''s revealed in the climactic courtroom scene to be hidden in the "Judas window". In the British prison system, a "Judas window" is in the door of a cell and enables the guards to observe prisoners without being seen themselves. But Sir Henry Merrivale points out another Judas window that is in every room, but that no one notices.

The Judas Window

The book, based in an unknown country and at a point in the unspecified past, opens with the end of death. Mysteriously, at the stroke of midnight of January 1st, no one in the country can die any more. Initially, the people of this country celebrate their apparent victory over mankind''s longtime foe. Though the traditional sources for guidance on things like life and death endeavor to discover why people have stopped dying, religious authorities, philosophers and scholars alike can find no answers. The Catholic Church, in fact, feels quite threatened by this new turn of events, as the end of death would call into question one of the fundamental foundations of their dogma: the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The common citizens, however, generally enjoy their newfound immortality. This joy is short-lived, though. It soon becomes apparent that the end of death presents unique demographic and financial challenges. The complete cessation of dying leads to a growing fear among healthcare workers that the system will collapse under its own weight: generations of incapacitated, but still living, people will populate care homes and hospitals for, presumably, all eternity. Funeral workers, on the other hand, fear the opposite problem: they will have no business, and will be forced to move to preparing animals for the afterlife. A means of finally killing people, and relieving families of the burden of their catatonic kin, is devised and implemented by an underground group known only as the Maphia (the ''ph'' is chosen as to avoid any confusion with the more sinister Mafia) The incapacitated are brought over the borders of the country, where they instantly die, as death has not ceased working elsewhere. The industry develops so quickly that the government itself becomes beholden to the maphioso, even bringing it to the brink of war with its neighbors. Death reemerges not long thereafter, this time as a woman named death (the lowercase name is used to signify the difference between the one who ends the life of people, and the one will end all of the universe). She announces, through a missive sent to the media, that her experiment has ended, and people will begin dying again. However, in an effort to kill more kindly, death will now send a letter to those about to perish, giving them a week to prepare for their end. Naturally, the violet envelope encased letters create a frenzy in the country, as people are not just returned to dying, but also must face the spectre of receiving one of these letters, and having their fate sealed with it. From here, the story largely moves on to focus to death''s relationship with an otherwise unextraordinary cellist who, amazingly, will not die. Every time death sends him his letter, it returns. Death discovers that, without reason, this man has mistakenly not been killed. Although originally intending merely to analyze this man, and discover why he is so unique, death eventually becomes infatuated with him , enough so that she takes human form to meet him. Upon visiting him, she plans to personally give him the letter; instead, she falls in love with him, and by doing so she takes on a human form, and, as the book originally started, there is no dying the next day.

Death with Interruptions

Nicholas Halloway is a 34-year-old Manhattan securities analyst who writes a narrative memoir (presumably this book) of his life starting on the day of an accident which renders him invisible. He recounts his involvement in a romantic affair with Anne Epstein, a woman who has taken interest in his aptitude for business and is a reporter for the Times. He escorts her to MicroMagnetics where scientists are holding a press conference for research on the magnetic containment of a nuclear process. While there, Nick sees a group of Marxist student protesters who demonstrate nuclear catastrophe by attempting to explode a cat. To get everyone away from the MicroMagnetics presentation, they cut off power to the laboratory where nuclear equipment is operating. The control computers lose function and in a flash of eerie light, everything in a fifty-foot radius becomes invisible, including Nick. Nick later wakes up in astonishment concluding that his limbs were blown off, that he became a ghost, and finally that he became invisible. Military personnel quickly set up fences and camps around the site and they soon discover Nick''s presence. They lose his trust by bringing a net and he overhears that they plan to give him to scientists and enlist him for military espionage, while disregarding his personal liberty for national security. He decides to loot miscellaneous invisible items, shoot the leg and waist of a captor, and set fire to the building in the process of escaping. He goes back to his apartment and discovers that food becomes invisible after being digested over a long time. He can remain invisible for the rest of his life and must surmount obstacles of invisibility that wouldn''t affect a visible person, for instance, driving, working, sheltering, etc. While avoiding government agents, he arranges a fake paper identity and authorizes funds to make himself a millionaire while ending up in the care of Alice Monroe, a red-blonde woman in her late twenties.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man

Following a painful divorce from his wife Nickie, Robert Forester leaves New York and moves to a small Pennsylvania town, where he develops an obsession with the seemingly happy, 23-year old Jenny Thierolf. As a way of easing his own discontent with life, he begins spying on her through her kitchen window, and is surprised when she invites him into her house after spotting him one night. Jenny sees their chance meeting as an act of fate, and breaks off the engagement to her hot-tempered fiancé Greg Wyncoop. During the next weeks, Jenny in turn goes after Robert, contacting him at his home and the company he works at. Robert is offered a promotion at work (which will require him to move to another city), and he hopes this will put an end to Jenny''s advances, which he is feeling increasingly uneasy about. One night, Greg starts a fight with Robert, which ends in Greg being knocked unconscious and left on a river bank by Robert. Soon afterwards, Greg is reported missing, with Robert becoming a suspect for the police. Also, Robert''s ex-wife Nickie tells the police that Robert once threatened her with a weapon. After a newspaper article on the case appears, Robert''s promotion is withdrawn. A badly decomposed body is found in the river which the police believe to be Greg''s, but the identification proves to be difficult. The fragile relationship between Robert and Jenny deteriorates quickly, and finally Jenny commits suicide after coming to the conclusion that Robert''s appearance in her life symbolizes her death. Nickies new husband Ralph informs Robert that Greg''s disappearance is actually a plot of Greg and Nickie against him. Later, Robert is shot at by Greg (severely wounding another person instead). Greg is arrested by the police but released. In a final confrontation between Robert, Greg and Nickie, Nickie is accidentally killed when Greg tries to knife Robert. Again, Robert is a suspect in an apparent crime scene.

The Cry of the Owl

In June 1917, whilst recovering from shell shock inside a military hospital, beloved war poet and dedicated soldier Viscount Abercrombie is inexplicably shot dead. Meanwhile, Douglas Kingsley, a liberal Inspector for Scotland Yard, has refused national service because he considers the war to be an affront to his highly prized sense of logic. As a result, he''s hauled before a judge, branded a coward by those who love him - including his wife Agnes - and thrown into prison, where his fellow inmates routinely assault him, taking revenge for him putting them behind bars in the first place. However, the Home Office give the disgraced copper a chance for redemption when they abduct him from his cell, fake his death and order him to investigate the Viscount''s death behind the lines at Flanders. As he begins his reluctant inquiries, encumbered by the presence of his psychopathic minder Captain Shannon, Kingsley discovers that not only was Abercrombie a homosexual, but that he had also become disillusioned with the war and was composing poetry to this effect before his untimely death.

The First Casualty

The novel is about a man named David Rain who goes to college and needs a place to stay. He finds a house on Wayward Crescent and moves in as a tenant, but little does he know that one step into the house would change his life forever. The owner of the house, Elizabeth Penykettle (also called Liz for short), gladly lets David stay with her and Lucy, her daughter. Liz earns her living by making clay dragons. The dragons are revealed to be more than meets the eye when Liz crafts David his own dragon, Gadzooks. David immediately takes a liking to his story-writing dragon, but is surprised when he begins to receive visions, almost telepathic, in his head, depicting the dragon writing words on his notebook. One day, David overhears Liz telling Lucy the story of Gawain''s Fire Tear (the story of the last dragon on Earth) which gives David and the reader a greater understanding of the dragons. After hearing this story, David ties many clues together and comes up with a theory that Liz and Lucy are descendants of Guinevere, a woman in the story who comforted Gawain as he died. As time passes, David finds his relationship with his dragon slowly declining. David must give his dragon love in order to save Zookie(Gadzooks) and prevent his fire within from diminishing forever. Lucy, an eleven year-old girl, loves squirrels. For Lucy''s birthday, David writes a book about the squirrels that has been named, and creates a made-up story about them. Some parts of the story that David writes have a funny coincidence with what happens in real life. Lucy brings it on David to help her catch a half-blind grey squirrel she named Conker. The two eventually catch Conker along with another squirrel named Snigger, and bring them to an animal shelter for help. Conker''s eye eventually heals, but it is revealed that Conker has kidney failure and could very well die soon. David and Lucy, along with a girl from the animal shelter named Sophie, let Conker free in the library gardens. Later, Conker dies a happy death, and David finishes the story, earning him Sophie''s heart.

The Fire Within

In the near future, an increasingly robot-reliant society faces extinction after a computer scientist accidentally unleashes a sentient artificial intelligence named Archos. After failed attempts at making a non-homocidal artificial intelligence, the safeguards in a computer science lab are compromised. Archos, a supremely intelligent AI, becomes self-aware and immediately starts planning the decimation of human civilization in an attempt to preserve Earth''s biodiversity. After infecting all penetrable networked electronic devices (cars, airplanes, elevators, robots, etc.) with a "precursor virus", Archos begins planning a systematic attack on the human race. Before a full blown attack on humanity commences, Archos launches probing attacks to analyze the technical feasibility of its strategies and to assess human response. The random attacks are designed to look like sporadic malfunctions of devices that humans depend on for their everyday routines--a domestic robot attacking innocents, planes intentionally set on a collision course, smarts cars driving out of control. Finally, at the Zero Hour, the entire automated world turns against humanity. Small bands of survivors find ways to circumvent the eradication and survive without modern technology. This is a story of those survivors in the months and days leading up to and following the cataclysm. A group of Native Americans (whose leader has a son that is a POV character) lead a group that fights back, their base being a reservation, culminating in an attack where some of the group turned into a robot/human hybrid with zombie-like behavior. In the end, a "freeborn" robot allied with a human squad, cuts off Archos''s communication with its robotic hordes. Archos''s base is infiltrated and the genocidal mastermind is destroyed by a stone age assault--bombardment with boulders--ending the war.

Robopocalypse

The story opens with the main characters Nadia Santos and Alexander Cold being on safari in Kenya and accompanying Alex''s grandmother Kate, who works as a reporter for the magazine International Geographic. At a certain point in their stopover, they visit a market where a seer tells them to stay close to each other if they want to avoid danger. Soon afterwards, the team is joined by a Roman Catholic missionary who introduces himself as Brother Fernando. The clergyman asks the crew to fly him to Ngoubé, a village situated deep inside the African jungle. Two of his friars, who had previously moved into the village to look after the heavily disadvantaged population, have recently sent him a letter telling him about the villagers'' disastrous conditions and their constantly worsening situation. Their deteriorating state is due to the two rulers of the village, who, alongside the mysterious and powerful sorcerer Sombe, cruelly torment the villagers and are not fond at all of the friars'' presence. Despite some arguments arising between Brother Fernando and the seductive African pilot Angie Ninderera, Kate and the others agree to come along with the priest and help him find the friars. Angie reluctantly agrees to fly the crew to the village''s whereabouts. Upon landing, Angie''s plane gets broken by crashing onto a small beach, therefore isolating them from the outside world. Several days later, the crew is found by some fishermen who grudgingly guide them to the entrance of a forest which, according to them, belongs to a very dangerous and tyrannical king called Kosongo. He brutally usurped the command of Ngoubé some time earlier - causing the former queen Nana-Asanta to disappear - and terrorizes its population, availing himself of his two assistants, a mysterious sorcerer called Sombe and the commandant Maurice Mbembelé, with both of them being notorious for their cruelty and cold-bloodedness. Once the crew has arrived in the village and been taken to Kosonge, they masquerade as reporters who want to interview Kosongo about his allegedly world-renowned wisdom and supernatural skills. Kosongo finally orders the crew to spend the rest of the day in an unfurnished hut surrounded by soldiers watching them. Over the course of the following nights, Nadia explorates the village on her own and discovers that the villagers'' wives are forced to spend the nights imprisoned in a couple of barracks. After some difficulties in terms of communication and understanding, she manages to gain the women''s support, who too suffer from the horrible tyranny, having been separated from their husbands and sons. The commandant Mbembelé actually forces those ones to become brainwashed soldiers and obliges them to spy on their own families. Alex and Nadia eventually escape into the forest to search for the pygmies and convince them of rebelling against Kosongo and Mbembelé. They furthermore come across the village''s former queen Nana-Asante, who agrees to support them as well. The pygmies eventually leave the wood and turn up in the village. One of their leaders challenges Mbembelé to a duel. Thanks to his agility and rapidity he finally exhausts the commandant, who is subsequently chased away by Alexander himself in the shape of a giant black jaguar. Shortly after Mbembelé''s getaway, the terrifying sorcerer Sombe shows up in the village, his terrifying appearance smashing the villagers'' resistance at once. Nadia, who has meanwhile stayed in the forest, arrives in the village in the shape of a white eagle, accompanied by Nana-Asante and many other people equipped with magical powers whom Nadia and Alex had met during their former journeys, each of them being narrated in the two previous volumes of Allende''s trilogy. At the end of the battle, when Sombe has to face his imminent failure, Angie rips his mask off, and Mbembelé, Sombe and Kosongo turn out to be the same person. The man is thrown into a waterhole full of crocodiles. Brother Fernando decides to stay in the village and help the population restore their existence. Angie Ninderera succeeds in contacting a friend of hers, who promises to pick up the crew by means of a helicopter. The epilogue is set two years after Alex''s and Nadia''s adventure in the African jungle. Alex has graduated from school and begun to study medicine at Berkeley. He has finally managed to persuade Nadia into attending university in the United States. Alex has just flown to New York City, where Kate and Nadia share an apartment. Alex wants to take Nadia to a graduation ceremony. Kate has written three books about their adventures which she now shows to her grandson.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

The Twelve and the Genii

By Pauline Clarke

Outcast

By Michelle Paver

Evernight

By Claudia Gray

Built for Trouble

By Ralph Salaway

The Judas Window

By John Dickson Carr

Death with Interruptions

By José Saramago

Memoirs of an Invisible Man

No Author Listed

The Cry of the Owl

By Patricia Highsmith

The First Casualty

By David L. Seidman

The Fire Within

By Chris D''Lacey

Robopocalypse

By Daniel H. Wilson

Forest of the Pygmies

By Isabel Allende