The sole survivor of a massacre, Caladrius, nicknamed Rook, has been living with the bards of Luly since the day he was rescued from the smoldering remains of his home. Despite falling in love and having a son, Caladrius is unable to make peace with his memories, and so ventures into the world to discover how his family was destroyed - and why. He learns his true name: he is Raven Tourmalyne from the house of Griffin, which was crushed by Arioso Pellior, the patriarch of the house of Basilisk and tyrant of the city of Berylon. In Berylon, Caladrius, who takes the name of Griffin, enters Pellior''s house as a music teacher for Pellior''s decidedly un-musical daughter. As Griffin tutors Damiet Pellior for an upcoming opera, the city''s musicians hatch their own plots. Armed with his picochet, a single-stringed instrument played by peasants, and a small bone pipe, Griffin challenges the Basilisk and exacts his revenge. But his revenge is not complete. Arioso Pellior is stricken, but not dead. Pellior names his other daughter, Luna, a powerful magician who has been his apprentice all her life, as his heir. Unexpectedly, Luna declares that thirty-seven years of torturing Tourmalyne House are enough. Hearing this, her father dies of anger. Luna begins to help Caladrius restore Tourmalyne House.

Song for the Basilisk

Giuseppe, a boy who has to collect money for his padrone, one day finds a green violin from a shipwreck. The beautiful sound the violin makes possesses people into loving it and may just earn him enough money for his secret stash to eventually buy a ticket to his native country, Italy. Meanwhile, Frederick works on his automaton which hopefully will promote him out of apprenticeship, and a girl named Hannah works as a maid where she hears of hidden riches in the hotel where she works. Shortly after, she becomes the personal assistant of a strange guest, Madame Pomeroy. Two weeks later, Giuseppe then saves Frederick from being bullied, and the two become friends. Madame Pomeroy asks Frederick to construct an automaton for her, and Frederick and Hannah meet. Stephano discovered Giuseppe''s secrets and tries to capture him, but Giuseppe escapes and hides out in a park. Hannah discovers that a man named Mister Stroop supposedly left the treasure in the suites at the top of the hotel. She later sees a map that hints it may near a pond in the park. She runs to look for it when she desperately needs money for her sick father''s medicine. There she meets Giuseppe, and the two look for the treasure but it is not there, though she receives some herbal medicine from a woman who worked as a gardener in the hotel. Hannah''s father draws for her where the treasure is hidden in the hotel, having worked for Stroops hotel in the past. The next day the three children all meet for the first time and Frederick shows the other two his automaton. The three agree to help each other out with their problems. Giuseppe mentions that he saw a clockwork head— Frederick''s only missing piece— in a museum. The three sneak into the museum so Frederick can inspect the head, but they are interrupted by guards and forced to flee. Frederick escapes with the "borrowed" head, which was made by Albertus Magnus. Hannah also accidentally took a small piece of clay belonging to a golem, which she inserts into the clockwork man''s chest. This, coupled with the Magnus head, gives him near-human intelligence. Hannah discovers that Mister Stroup''s treasure is actually his will, witnessed by the hotel''s owner, Mister Twine. She and Frederick talk to him, but Hannah refuses to take the money because it would cause the park to be destroyed. Mister Twine promotes her to the chief of maids, and gives her quite a bit of money for new dresses, a portion of which she gives to Giuseppe for his ticket. A law was passed that the padrones no longer had legal control over their buskers. Enraged, Stephano tries to kill Giuseppe, but they are saved by Madame Pomeroy, who lets Giuseppe travel with her to play his green violin for kings and queens. Frederick eventually makes journeyman, and Hannah''s father''s health improves.

The Clockwork Three

In Clade, the Ecocaust, an environmental disaster, causes major problems such as rising sea levels and additional strains on human resources. Although civilization recovers from this disaster, they do so at the expense of their previous freedoms. "Polycorps" develop from governments and corporations. The wonders of biotech introduce a new class system where human beings have been socially engineered at the molecular level through a process called "clading." This "clading" process places entire socioeconomic or ethnic groups made to be biologically predisposed to live in particular communities. If a person enters a community that they have not been claded to, the consequences could be devastating, resulting in sickness or death. Although it is not intentionally racist, businesses and retail outlets using this clading process to keep away the riffraff, will simply screen out clientele below a certain prosperity level. Therefore, a black market exists enabling people to buy the right biotech to inhibit the "pherions" in their systems to be placed in a certain clade. The protagonist is a man named Rigo, a Latino from the San Jose clade who wants to move up in society. Rigo accepts a job at a biotech firm that develops special vegetation for a planned orbital colony. Although his friends look down on him with contempt for selling out, he still maintains a close relationship with his mother, lawless brother, and Anthea, his troubled girlfriend. At work, after Rigo fears being exposed to some dangerous pherions, he finds to his surprise that the company he works for eagerly wants to send some of the plants they''ve been working on into space; and they want Rigo to supervise the transfer. Something about the haste of the company leaves Rigo feeling fishy. The secrets of this story unravel one after another, leading to holes in the plot.

Clade

Set in the middle of the twenty-first century, The Simulacra is the story of several protagonists within the United States of Europe and America (USEA), formed by the merger of (West) Germany and the United States, where the whole government is a fraud and the President (der Alte, "the Old Man") is a simulacrum (android). As well as the USEA, other global superpowers are the French Empire, People''s Republic of China and Free (Black) Africa. There is some mention of a World War Three, which may have involved some tactical nuclear weapons, and a possibility that the Soviet Union exists. Communism still exists, but Poland has become its global centre of authority, with its administrative centre now based in Warsaw. Society is stratified into ''Ges'' (German Geheimnisträger, "bearers of the secret" (the elite)) and ''Bes'' (German Befehlsträger, "implementers of instruction" (professional and artisanal)) classes, and there is conspicuous consolidation of political and broadcast media power. The Democratic and Republican Parties merged into a single party, the ''Democrat-Republican Party'' and the ''United Triadic Network'' presumably resulted from an amalgamation of NBC, CBS and ABC. In addition, actual political power has devolved to a permanent First Lady, Nicole Thibodeaux, whose consorts are a series of male presidents – die Alten. While the current der Alte, Rudi Kalbfleisch, is a simulacrum, "Nicole" is human, although the original Nicole Thibodeaux died several decades ago. Since the death of the original, her role has been portrayed by four consecutive actors, and the latest such figure is Kate Rupert. This is a Geheimnis (secret), and insider possession of this secret is enough to insure elite membership through conferral of Ges status. A secretive governing council controls the USEA, although ''Karp und Söhne Werke'', as manufacturers of the current der Alte-simulacrum, exerts some power. The next simulacrum contract, for Dieter Hogbein, however, will be given to ''Frauenzimmer Associates'', and Karp und Söhne is unhappy about this new contractual arrangement. One subplot involves the Karp und Söhne Werke threatened exposure of what has been a state secret over the last five decades. Nicole dislikes Kalbfleisch, although inbuilt obsolescence means that he is about to suffer an obligatory heart attack and he will be replaced in his turn. Kalbfleisch only momentarily appears in this novel. Doctor Egon Superb encounters additional difficulties because A. G. Chemie, the leading USEA psycho-pharmaceutical drug cartel, has engineered the prohibition of psychotherapy under the "MacPhearson Act." However, the USEA is willing to let him continue to practice, and treat Richard Kongrosian, a well known pianist who performs in the White House. Richard Kongrosian believes that his body odor is lethal; this belief is delusional, he has no such body odor. Kongrosian has telekinetic abilities: he can play piano using only his mind. Nicole Thibodeaux is anxious to keep his abilities under control, as are Wilder Pembroke, head of the National Police, and members of the covert national governance council. Bertold Goltz (an alleged neofascist) is seemingly trying to overthrow the government, and runs the ''Sons of Job'', a religious paramilitary organisation, although he is not what he seems, and is secretly head of the covert USEA governing council. In addition, there is a subplot that involves Charles (Chic) Strikerock, Vince, his brother and a cut-price colonisation spacecraft sales firm (known as "Loony Lukes") involved in Martian colonisation. Mars boasts insectoid life, the sentient and empathic ''papoola'', while Ganymede is inhabited by multicellular primitive life forms. Nothing is as it seems, and the novel ends inconclusively. The der Alte-simulacrum has been revealed as an android and Kate/Nicole has been disclosed as an impostor- therefore undoing the Geheimnis (secret) raison d''etre for ges/bes class stratification. Bertold Goltz is killed by a National Police detachment, as is the rest of the covert governing council. Using telekinesis, Kongrosian kills Pembroke before he can overthrow Nicole in a coup d''etat and teleports her to safety at his secluded Northern US home. Karp und Sohnen rebel against the abortive coup, however, and soon the National Police and USEA armed forces are engaged in civil war, with active use of low-yield nuclear weapons. Recrudescent Neanderthals (or "chuppers") seem happy at this turn of events, as they gather near Kongrosian''s home: the imminent self-destruction of Homo sapiens might give them another opportunity to dominate Earth.

The Simulacra

The poem narrates the life of a white Jamaican, Adam Cole, born sometime in the 1930s and so growing up during World War II, during which his uncle Johann, of German extraction, is interned in the same camp as future national leader Alexander Bustamante. Adam has a close friend, Nathan, a poor black boy who is a gardener and groom, but education forces them apart. After taking a degree at Oxford University in the 1950s Adam returns to Jamaica to work as a journalist on the Daily Tribune (a version of The Daily Gleaner) and marries a Jamaican Chinese, Amber Lee. They have a daughter, Chantal, but when she is 15 (sometime in the early 1970s) she is raped in the grounds of her school, and the marriage subsequently breaks up, Amber and Chantal emigrating to Canada while Adam stays in Kingston and becomes ever more committed to crusading journalism. A parallel historical narrative charts Jamaica''s progress from Crown Colony to full independence, and its subsequent descent into serious civil violence. Corruption, veniality, sectarianism, and other elements forming what Rastafarians call the ''politricks'' of Jamaica are noted, but the principal force for evil is squarely diagnosed as the international cocaine trade, in its facilitation of material corruption, in the morally deadening toleration of violence it promotes, and in the appalling opportunity cost it imposes on national infrastructrure, education, and business. From this history a series of vignettes emerge, of profits turned, of a needless death on the operating table caused by a substandard generator, of extrajudicial killing by a special police squad, and of events in the life of a principal cocaine baron—Adam''s sometime friend, Nathan. Eventually an enforcer named Blaka, spurred by religious conversion, becomes an informer for Adam, whose journalism begins to expose too many secrets of the ''runnings'', or details of shipments and transactions. Adam also hears the dying confession of a white middleman, Tony ''the Frog'' Blake, who knows of Nathan''s involvement, and so becomes an unacceptable threat to the cocaine trader—and as Blaka observes, "Blood / cheaper than drugs" (946-7). Blaka is found murdered on Mount Diablo (a central Jamaican height), "stuffed in a handcart, head severed, torso turned / to the mountain, blank eyes staring down the valley [...] the word Judas, warning intaglio, / carved with a switchblade into the transom" (955-9); another body is floating in the harbour; and Adam himself is confronted at home, and after a brief struggle shot dead, by Nathan. Formally, View from Mount Diablo uses a tragic (i.e. failed, abortive) Bildungsroman structure to support a state-of-the-nation novel; additional topoi and tropes concerning the drug trades and policing are drawn both from real Jamaican life and from popular cinematic and print fictions of crime. Technically, the verse novel is written in loosely heroic single-rhymed quatrains—i.e. the metre consistently approximates iambic pentameter, and the four-line stanzas rhyme abcb. It is structured in a prologue and 12 chapters, and has 1,048 lines.

View from Mount Diablo

Horace Cross is a gay black teenager from Tims Creek, North Carolina. He is fascinated with science and comic books, and his family is convinced that he is going to make them proud. Horace grows up in a fundamentalist Baptist church family which condemns homosexuality, forcing Horace to stay in the closet for sometime, and constantly wrestle with his self identity. The story starts with an internal dialogue about Horace''s desire and quest to turn himself into a bird. When his ritual for this transformation fails, he is apparently possessed by a demon. Armed with his grandfather''s gun and mostly naked, he wanders around his hometown, experiencing flashbacks and revelations which tell the story of his life, his struggles with homosexuality, and the failures of his closest friends and family to save him from his fate. Mixed into the telling of Horace''s journey is "present" and past events explaining more about how Horace''s elder cousin, Jimmy Greene, becomes a minister and the principal of the local high school. Jimmy can''t give any real advice of his own, and has to turn to the Bible when confronted with a problem (he references the Old Testament when Horace comes out to him and, in fact, advises Horace to, paradoxically, "Search your heart. Take it to the Lord. But don''t dwell on it too much. You''ll be fine. Believe me."). In the present to the story thread of this book, Jimmy drives his great-aunt Ruth and his uncle Ezekiel to see one of their relatives, Asa Cross, in the hospital. At a diner, Ruth has an argument with Ezekiel; Jimmy attempts to quell it but he remains unsuccessful, in spite of his being a church minister. In the end, Ezekiel tries to teach Jimmy that he can''t turn to the Bible to solve all of his problems.

A Visitation of Spirits

Growing up among the Ilyassai, a fierce tribe of warrior-herdsmen who despise his origin, the young Imaro struggles for acceptance after the breaking of a taboo forces his mother to leave him behind. The boy becomes a man, unlike any other the Ilyassai has ever seen. His quest acceptance and identity continues. Yet he learns he has powerful enemies, human and inhuman. Prevailing over foes who desire nothing more than to see him dead, Imaro finds that in victory, there can be loss. Departing from the Ilyassai, Imaro roams afar, wandering across the vast continent of Nyumbani, pitting his prodigious strength and courage against men, beasts and demons. Hunted by relentless foes, Imaro becomes the hunter. Eventually, he finds friendship and love among people who are like him, exiles and outlaws. Yet forces beyond Imaro’s comprehension are aligned against him. As he rises to prominence, events preordained before Imaro’s birth begin to unfold. Powers are stirring in Nyumbani, the Africa of a world that is beyond the one we know. And Imaro learns that some of the powers are aligned against him. As he struggles to hold on to his hard won acceptance, the warrior seeks the answer to the question that has haunted him all his life:

Imaro

Azriel is telling the story of his transformation into and subsequent existence as an immortal genii who is forced to obey the Master who calls him. Over centuries, Azriel becomes less obedient to the Masters and a warning is placed on the casket of his bones that he is not to be summoned lest his evil be loosed upon the undeserving world. After many centuries of rest, Azriel finds himself awake and in New York City, a dazed witness to the murder of a young woman, Esther Belkin. He becomes inexplicably obsessed with the desire to avenge her death and to find out who called him into the physical world in time to see Esther die but not in time to save her. This quest leads him to the girl''s stepfather, Gregory Belkin, who would pay any price to fulfill his messianic dream via his immense worldwide religious organization, the Temple of the Mind of God. As his quest approaches its climax, he risks his supernatural powers to forestall an attempt to destroy the world thus redeeming what was denied him for so long: his own eternal human soul.

Servant of the Bones

We Can Build You is set in the then-future year of 1982. It centers on Louis Rosen, a small businessman whose company produces spinets and electronic organs. Rosen''s partner wants to begin production of simulacra, or androids, based on famous Civil War figures. The firm completes two prototypes, one of Edwin M. Stanton and one of Abraham Lincoln. Rosen then attempts to sell the robot patents to Sam K. Barrows, an influential businessman who is opening up lunar real estate for purchase and colonization. Unfortunately, while the Stanton simulacrum proves able to adapt to contemporary U.S. society, the Lincoln simulacrum proves unable to do so, possibly due to the fact that the original experienced schizophrenia. At the same time, Louis begins a relationship with Pris Frauenzimmer, the schizophrenic daughter of his business partner, who has designed both simulacra. This becomes an obsession and Louis himself begins to hallucinate about Pris. At the same time, Pris defects to Barrows but then loses faith in the benevolence of their partnership when his objectives are disclosed as more prosaic than hers, with his plans to use simulacra colonists to entice human settlement on the Moon and other human interplanetary colonies within the solar system. After Pris''s destruction of a John Wilkes Booth prototype simulacrum, the Stanton/Lincoln simulacra strand of the plot abruptly terminates. The remainder of the book deals with Louis Rosen''s admission of schizophrenia and his Jungian therapeutic treatment at the Kasanin Centre in Kansas from where Pris was originally released. Under the influence of his therapist Rosen creates a virtual hallucinatory reality of his own where he resumes his relationship with Pris, marries her, has children and grows old together with her, finally culminating with him hitting her hallucinatory doppelgänger in a fit of pique. This concludes his final therapy session and he is released from the Kasanin clinic after his doctor accuses him of malingering. The end of the novel posits the query of whether he was actually batty to begin with. The real-world Pris, however, has become unwell again, and she is returned to Kasanin following her short-lived career as a simulacra designer.

We Can Build You

After attending his parents funeral, Marcus Novius Faustus Leo, the teenage nephew of the emperor (and heir apparent since the death of his father), is informed by his fathers secretary Varius that his father Leo and his mother were murdered by a conspiracy concerned about Leo''s ambition to abolish slavery. While this is happening, Varius'' wife eats sweets given to Marcus by his cousin Makaria and dies of poisoning. Varius promptly arranges for Marcus to flee to a hidden refuge in Spain, run by Delir, an anti-slavery activist and secret ally of Leo. Meanwhile, a British slave named Una, who has the ability to read minds, rescues her brother Sulien who has been falsely accused of rape and sentenced to crucifixion. The three runaways meet in Gaul. Despite initial suspicion, they agree to help each other and travel to the refuge. However, Varius has been arrested and the conspirators force him to reveal the location of the refuge, as well as making him confess to the murder of Marcus''s parents, as well as the murder of Marcus himself. Upon discovering that Varius has confessed to murdering him and his parents, Marcus decides to go to Rome to reveal he is in fact still alive, planning to reveal the conspiracy in public so the conspirators will be unable to kill him. He runs away from the refuge and travels to Rome, evading the soldiers sent to capture him. Una and Sulien follow him, but are unable to find him in time to prevent him revealing himself. Marcus reveals himself but is captured and taken to a hospital. There he is injected with a hallucinogen by one of the conspirators so that when Emperor Faustus is taken to him, Marcus appears to be mad. As many of the Imperial family have succumbed to a hereditary madness in the past (including, apparently, Marcus'' other uncle, Lucius), Faustus agrees to keep Marcus in seclusion. The runaway slaves make it to Rome, and manage to rescue Marcus from the asylum where he is being held. Thereafter, Marcus succeeds in revealing the truth about Varius'' innocence to the emperor, as well as the plot to kill him. Makaria manages to exculpate herself from any involvement in the conspiracy, pouring suspicion onto the emperor''s current wife, Tulliola.

Romanitas

Living in a tiny chocolaterie in Montmartre, Paris, Vianne and her daughters Anouk and Rosette have forsaken magic and adventure for a stable, if unhappy life. Vianne has now become the widow Yanne Charbonneau, mother of ''Annie''. Hiding her magical nature, she feels she is doing the right thing by her daughters, but she herself is dissatisfied: there is friction with Anouk; money is short; there is pressure from her landlord, Thierry le Tresset, to marry him and she no longer has time to make hand-made, quality chocolate, but is forced to sell the ordinary, factory-made kind. Anouk is equally unhappy. She is bullied at school and made to feel like a freak; her mother seems to have changed beyond recognition and she hates living in Paris. She misses Roux, Rosette''s father, with whom Vianne is still in love, but whom she left because of his inability to settle down. The situation seems hopeless and set to deteriorate. And then, on All Hallows'' Eve, Zozie de l''Alba blows into their lives, bringing back magic and enchantment. She seems to be exactly what Vianne herself used to be; a benevolent force, a free spirit, helping people wherever she goes. But Zozie is a thief of identities, maybe even a collector of souls. She has her eye on Vianne''s life, and begins to insinuate herself into the family. She is soon working at the chocolaterie, helping and understanding everyone as Vianne used to do. She helps Anouk to deal with the bullies who torment her at school. The shop begins to prosper under her guidance, much to Thierry''s displeasure. When Roux, Vianne''s former lover, re-appears on the scene, Zozie helps Vianne to decide between a stable life with Thierry and a loving relationship with the man she loves. But as Vianne''s life begins to improve little by little under Zozie''s influence, it becomes clear that all this must come at a terrible price. Finally, Vianne is forced to confront Zozie on her own ground, to reclaim her magic and her identity and to fight back - but is it too late?http://www.joanne-harris.co.uk/v3site/books/lollipop/index.html

The Lollipop Shoes

Chloe receives an e-mail from Jack. He’s got a surprise for her. Soon, she meets him in shopping centre. They''re going to go to a club with Chloe''s friends. Unfortunately, she sees him kissing another girl. Chloe decides to talk to his sister, Natalie, who explains her that, Jack doesn''t treat anyone seriously. Chloe asks Jack to go ice-skating with her on Christmas. During their conversation, she breaks up with him. Jasmin has a date with Sanjay in the museum. Unfortunately, her mother doesn''t let her go there. Sanjay is upset and he thinks that, Jasmin doesn''t like him. When they meet at schools, Jasmin tells him she loves him and they become a couple. Jasmin tells her mother that, she''s going to be in football team at school. But she has dates with Sanjay then, and when Jasmin''s mother discovers it, she isn''t angry, because she knows that she was wrong about him. Nick is still in love with Chloe and he believes that, she''ll change her opinion about Jack. Unfortunately, he arrives to Leeds. Nick''s mother has got problems with debts, which are still growing. His grandmother blames Nick''s dad and he has enough. He runs away from home and he meets Sinéad, who wants help with homework. Nick organises football team at Lockbridge. Sinéad is in it, too, because she wants to be closer to Nick. Sanjay''s father still thinks that computer animation is stupid idea for his son''s future. He still wants him to be a lawyer and he invites some of his own friends, who usually ask Sanjay about his future. Sanjay brings Rani for ice-skating with his friends. Sinéad is taking care of her and they''re friends. Still in love with Nick, Sinéad tries to get closer to him. Chloe helps her with choosing new clothes. Unfortunately, he still loves Chloe, but when they''re ice-skating, ho holds her hand. Suddenly Sinéad breaks her ankle. Nick offers her to organise cheerleaders for football team, because Sinéad won''t train for several months.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Song for the Basilisk

By Patricia A. McKillip

The Clockwork Three

By Matthew J. Kirby

Clade

By Mark Budz

The Simulacra

By Philip K. Dick

View from Mount Diablo

No Author Listed

A Visitation of Spirits

By Randall Kenan

Imaro

By Charles R. Saunders

Servant of the Bones

By Anne Rice

We Can Build You

By Philip K. Dick

Romanitas

By Sophia McDougall

The Lollipop Shoes

By Joanne Harris

Best Friends Getting Sorted

No Author Listed