Kendra and Seth Sorenson are shipped off by their parents to Grandma and Grandpa Sorensons house for seventeen days while their parents go on a cruise set up by Grandma and Grandpa Larson for their children and spouses after they died. When they get to the house, Grandpa Sorenson tells them that their grandmother is visiting their dying Great Aunt Edna and introduces them to Lena, the half-Asian housekeeper, and Dale, a man who helps Grandpa Sorenson tend to the grounds. Once Seth and Kendra''s parents are gone, Grandpa Sorenson sets up two rules, which are that they must keep out of the woods, and that they cannot go in the barn. They visit their attic bedroom, and much to Kendra and Seth''s delight, it is filled with many toys and activities to keep them busy. Also, there is a pet chicken named Goldilocks. Before he leaves, Grandpa Sorenson gives Kendra three keys so that they can, as Grandpa says: "See if you can figure out what each unlocks." Seth and Kendra go swimming the next day and Kendra brings out a mirror to shine light in Seth''s eyes. When she leaves it out, hoards of butterflies, bumblebees, and hummingbirds flock over to it. When Kendra and Seth flip over the mirror, the obsessed critters flip it back over again. Later, Kendra finds that the biggest key unlocks a jewelry box full of costume jewelry, and the tiniest key unlocks an armoire inside the dollhouse. In the armoire is a piece of chocolate shaped like a rosebud, and a small golden key, bigger than the key that opened the armoire, but smaller than the key that opened the jewelry box. Kendra searches a telescope that stands near a window for keyholes, but finds nothing. She is about to turn away when she sees Dale carrying something in both hands. When she goes to the yard to confront him, it turns out that it is just milk. Dale tells Kendra that their milking cows make a little extra milk than they need, so he puts it out for the insects, and also not to tell Grandpa Sorenson in case he disapproves. Seth disobeyed direct rules and was wandering the woods when he found a creepy old lady in an ivy shack. He ran back to the yard once she dared him to do something almost certainly dangerous. Back at the house, Kendra finds the Journal of Secrets with 3 keyholes, but none of the keys she has fits except the golden one she found in the dollhouse. Seth shows Kendra a hidden pond with gazebos, a boardwalk, and a boathouse. That night at dinner, Grandpa asks a rhetorical question, stating, "What do you suppose makes people so eager to break rules?" When Seth says that they weren''t afraid of ticks, Grandpa tells them the real reason why they have to stay out of the woods: He really runs a preserve full of endangered, poisonous animals. Seth goes into lawyer mode and manages to worm out of trouble. Since they have disobeyed his orders, they have to stay inside the house until their parents come to get them, but luckily, Kendra talks him out of it and they get partial punishment as a warning. Soon after, Kendra figures out how to open the journal completely, and inside all she finds is a single phrase, ''drink the milk''. Deciding that she needed a guinea pig to test the milk that Dale claimed to be hazardous, Kendra dared Seth to drink the milk. When Kendra drinks the milk, the insects flying around suddenly turn into fairies. Grandpa explains that his property is not a preserve for endangered animals, but for magical creatures such as fairies, trolls, and centaurs. This piece of information would completely turn their visit around, though not at first. Seth made a bad choice concerning a fairy, and was turned into some sort of mutated walrus. Luckily, the old lady Seth found in the woods managed to sort him out, though at a high price to his family. Later, Grandpa explains that Midsummer Eve is a time when all creatures, light or dark, can roam into the yard and warns to not, never, open the window, for whatever reason. Seth, giving in to his curious, disobedient reality, opened the window. That single action put his grandparents in danger, his sister in danger, and ultimately, he put the world in danger.

Fablehaven

Jacques Austerlitz, the main character in the book, is an architectural historian who encounters and befriends the solitary narrator in Antwerp during the 1960s. Gradually we come to understand his life history. He arrived in Britain during the summer of 1939 as an infant refugee on a kindertransport from a Czechoslovakia threatened by Hitler''s Nazis. He was adopted by an elderly Welsh Calvinist preacher and his sickly wife, and spent his childhood in Mid Wales before attending a minor public school. His foster parents died, and Austerlitz learned something of his background. After school he attended university and became an academic who is drawn to, and began his research in, the study of European architecture. After a nervous breakdown, Austerlitz visited Prague where he met a close friend of his lost parents. The elderly lady tells him the fate of his mother, an actress and opera singer who was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp. From Prague, Austerlitz traveled to Theriesenstadt. Here readers learn about the disappearance of European Jewry during the Holocaust. The novel shifts to contemporary Paris as Austerlitz seeks out any remaining evidence about the fate of his father. Sebald explores the ways in which collections of records, such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France or National Library of France, entomb memories. During the novel the reader is taken on a guided tour of a lost European civilization: a world of fortresses, railway stations, concentration camps and libraries.

Austerlitz

The First Four Years derives its title from a promise Laura made to Almanzo when they became engaged. Laura did not want to be a farmer''s wife, but consented to try farming for three years. Laura and Almanzo, whom Laura calls Manly, begin married life on his tree claim in the snug house Manly built. Laura keeps house and Manly tends the land and the stock, and they go on frequent pony rides together. At the end of the first year, just as the wheat is ready to harvest, a freak hailstorm destroys the entire crop, which would have brought them three thousand dollars and paid off their debts on farm equipment and the building of the house. Faced with mounting debt, Manly decides to mortgage the homestead claim. He and Laura will have to live on it as a condition of the mortgage, so they rent out the house on the tree claim and Manly builds a small home on the homestead claim. Their daughter Rose is born there in December. At the end of the second year, they share the harvest of the wheat crop with the tree claim''s renter, and make enough money to pay some of their smaller debts. During the third year, both Laura and Manly contract diphtheria, and Manly suffers a complication which leaves him permanently physically impaired. The renter decides to move away, and as Manly can no longer work both pieces of land, they sell the homestead claim and move back to their first house. Laura receives an opportunity to invest money in a flock of sheep. The wool from the sheep repays Laura''s initial investment with enough left over only for the interest on their debts. Meanwhile, the wheat and oats grow well, but are ruined just before harvest when several days of hot wind dry them irreparably prior to harvest. At the end of the third year, though farming has not yet been a success, Laura and Manly agree to continue for one more year, a "year of grace", in Laura''s words, since they have no other prospects and Manly believes they just need one good year to turn things around. Unfortunately, hot winds again ruin the next planting of wheat and oats. Their unnamed son is born in August but dies a few weeks later. Finally, their house is destroyed by fire. Despite this, the book ends at the close of the fourth year on an optimistic note, with Laura feeling hopeful that their luck will turn. In reality, debt and the hot, dry Dakota summers drove Laura and Manly from their land; they managed a very successful fruit and dairy farm in Missouri, where they lived comfortably until their respective deaths.

The First Four Years

The story concerns an Indian cavalry regiment which is sent to the France at the outbreak of the First World War. The Ravi Lancers is unusual in that it is part of the army of a semi-independent Hindu state (a Princely state) attached to British India. It accordingly follows different traditions than the regular regiments of the British Indian Army. These include a semi-feudal relationship between the Indian ''sowars'' (cavalrymen) and their ruler. It also means that all officers except for the British regiment commander are Indians, which would not have been the case in a regular regiment at the time. The book centers on the relationship between the regiment''s British commander (a member of the Savage family, though with a different family name) and his Indian second-in-command Krishna Ram - heir to the throne of the state of Ravi. The young Indian prince, originally a naive admirer of the British Empire, increasingly discovers its shortcomings and develops his own awareness of being Indian. The British commanding officer Colonel Bateman, originally liberal minded, becomes a harsh and demanding martinet under the stress of trench warfare. The situation is further complicated by Krishna Ram''s secret affair with Bateman''s sister. Finally the two divergent characters and their respective sets of values come to a shattering head-on clash in the midst of a devastating attack on the German trenches. The climax involves what is effectively a mutiny while trapped by the German counter-attack, a daring escape with the Indian soldiers relying on stealth to get back to the British lines, and the suicide of the broken Bateman at his estate in England, leaving the Indian protagonists with a strong feeling of guilt. At the end Krishna Ram decides that he and his men will remain on active service in France, rather than returning to Ravi, because "we gave our word to serve" and out of a form of loyalty to the dead Bateman.

The Ravi Lancers

The main protagonist in Romero''s novel is Violetta Rosario "Viola" Dananay. Viola narrates her life in the Philippines and her eventual move to the United States. Viola was conceived before the marriage of her parents who belong to Manila''s socialite class. Viola grew up in Manila during the regime of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. Her life was complicated by her quarrelsome parents. One of the main reasons for the disagreements between Viola''s parents was her father''s reputation as a womanizer and philanderer. Viola''s father left the family to live with a pregnant mistress. Viola''s mother, Ludy, left for the United States to escape the indiscretions of her husband, leaving Viola behind. Upon arrival in America, Viola''s mother became an undocumented immigrant working as a maid in New York City. After the fall of the Marcoses, Viola''s father was implicated in charges of corruption committed by the Marcos government. Viola''s father decided to send Viola, already a teenager, to the United States to live with her mother. Viola obeyed her father but with a "secret agenda": to return to the Philippines together with her mother.

Always Hiding

The story centers on Hart, a young law student from Minnesota who attends Harvard Law School and becomes obsessed with one of his teachers, Professor Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr. Hart becomes an expert on Kingsfield''s subject, contracts; he reads everything about the subject, including all of Kingsfield''s papers, most of which are not on the reading list. He goes so far as to break into the law library to read Kingsfield''s original law school notes. Hart becomes such an expert that Kingsfield asks him to contribute to a paper. At the same time, he begins a relationship with Susan Field, who turns out to be Kingsfield''s daughter. Susan stands aloof from the law-school rat-race and dismisses all the things Hart cares about most. At the end of the term, Professor Kingsfield really means something to his students, but he still does not know their names; indeed, he appears to be unable to smile. For him, the class is only a group of people, the students simply names on a paper. He does not even recognize Hart after several encounters and classroom debates. After one incident, wherein Kingsfield asks Hart to leave the class, Hart says in front of the lecture hall, "You are a son of a bitch, Kingsfield," to which Kingsfield merely responded with "Mr. Hart! That is the most intelligent thing you''ve said all day. You may take your seat." After much effort preparing for the final exam, Hart''s grade is delivered to him, but he simply makes a paper airplane out of his final report card, and sends it sailing into the Atlantic Ocean without looking at it.

The Paper Chase

After being attacked by empousai cheerleaders at his new school, Percy returns to Camp Half-Blood and learns about the Labyrinth; part of the palace of King Minos in Crete that was designed by Daedalus. He also meets the camp''s new sword master, Quintus. During a battle drill with Giant Scorpions at the camp, Annabeth and Percy accidentally find an entrance into the Labyrinth. Percy soon learns that Luke had used this entrance before and will try and lead his army through the Labyrinth straight into the heart of Camp Half-Blood. Annabeth reads the prophecy and comes back out of the Big House with a feeling of dread. When Percy and Annabeth privately meet afterwards in Athena''s cabin, and Percy asks her if she is okay, she is moved to tears and holds out her arms. Percy hugs her, telling her that she shouldn''t worry about whatever she was worrying about. What Percy doesn''t know is that Annabeth thinks that Percy is going to die. Using the Labyrinth, Percy, Annabeth, Grover, and Tyson, must find Daedalus to prevent Luke from obtaining Ariadne''s String; the tool that would allow Luke to navigate the Labyrinth. Percy and his friends encounter Kampê (Campe), a half woman, half-dragon monster, and free her prisoner, Briares the Hekatonkheires (Hundred-Handed One), Tyson''s idol. After an encounter with the goddess Hera and a battle at the farm of Geryon, the group is reunited with Nico di Angelo, son of Hades, who blames Percy for the death of his sister Bianca. Percy helps summon the spirit of Bianca, and Nico is convinced to put his grudge behind him by the ghost of his sister. The next day, however, Percy and his friends (without Nico) depart to find Hephaestus, hoping he would know the location of Daedulus. While travelling, the group gets separated, with Percy and Annabeth searching for Hephaestus and Tyson and Grover searching for Pan. After a meeting with Hephaestus, Annabeth and Percy go to Mt. St. Helens. There he finds telekhines, also known as "sea demons". He is discovered by the telkhines, who attack him. Percy finds Annabeth and they have a short argument during which Percy tells Annabeth to flee. Thinking that Percy is the one to die in the prophecy, Annabeth kisses Percy, tells him to be careful, and disappears. In an attempt to escape the telekhines, Percy causes Mt. St. Helens to erupt, pushing him out of the volcano, draining his energy in the process. When he awakens after the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, he finds himself in the mythical island inhabited by Calypso. After being treated for burns by Calypso and returning to the mortal world, Percy gets the help he needs from a mortal girl named Rachel Elizabeth Dare, who is able to see through the Mist; the magical veil that makes mortals see things differently than demigods. Grover finally finds Pan, but the god of the wild is dying and wants Grover to tell the other satyrs that they must save the natural world themselves. His spirit passes into all present, the satyr in particular, when he dies. They finally discover that Quintus, the mysterious new sword instructor at Camp Half-Blood, is actually Daedalus, who has attained extended life by putting his life-force, his animus, into a robot body and that Kronos has gained enough strength by Luke. He also possess Luke, using his body as a starter form. Kronos finds out that Nico di Angelo is a son of Hades and that he could be the child of the great prophecy, which states that a child of "Big Three" (Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades) would decide the fate of the gods. Luke has already reached Daedalus and attained Ariadne''s string; using the magical instrument, he sends out Kronos''s army to take Camp Half-Blood via the Labyrinth. While fighting a losing battle, the entire camp is either injured or killed, and Daedalus and Briares come out of the Labyrinth to help fight the battle and destroy Kampe. Grover rescues Camp Half-Blood by causing a Panic, which Pan had used once before, to scare away the enemy. After the battle, Daedalus sacrifices himself to close the Labyrinth, which is tied to his life. The camp say good bye to the dead, Nico leaves the camp, Grover travels trying to spread the message of Pan, Percy leaves for his 15th birthday and Nico comes by to offer him a proposal on how to defeat Kronos.

The Battle of the Labyrinth

Since David and Zanna are in the Arctic, they are unaware of what is happening back at home with Gretel, Zanna''s new dragon. After a few hours of Grockle''s existence, he was turned to stone. Gretel attempts to revive her lost friend. Liz had locked her up in a wooden cage in the Dragon''s Den (her at-home workshop). David writes a novel of the Arctic which he calls White Fire. He thinks what he''s writing is fiction, but it''s really happening to two bears called Ingavar and Thoran. As Thoran peacefully follows a sign, Ingavar must follow straight orders to steal something very precious from David. Tension is rising at the Pennykettles'' as Lucy is suddenly kidnapped by a long forgotten rival. This ''rival'' wishes to raise the ancient dragon Gawain from his stone-laden resting place. Over the time Lucy is there, she goes through extreme changes. Gwilanna knew this would happen as Lucy began to look like Guinevere, her ancestor. After a sudden bear attack and the news about Lucy, David returns home to help Liz overcome this rough time. In the middle of a serious conversation with Liz, David receives a heart-breaking phone call. He has just learned Zanna, his girlfriend, has just been kidnapped by bears. Under all this pressure, David breaks down. Liz soothes him in dragonsong, the ancient soothing method Guinevere used on the ancient dragon Gawain. While David is home, Grockle suddenly awakens to find the window opened. Curious as he was, he flew out of the window. Nobody could believe it. Happiness, shock and horror welled up in everyone at the sight of Grockle''s sudden move. Lucy is not having a good time at all. She must eat the disgusting stuff Gwilanna enjoys eating everyday. She decides to explore the cave of Gawain when Gwilanna leaves one day. She pushed around and discovers a secret hideaway she thinks her ancestor, Gwendolen, used. Eventually, she falls asleep by the bones of Gwendolen and a bear that guarded her. A female bear that thinks it is her ''last season on earth'' ventures into the cave, down into the hideaway, and decides to follow the dead bears example. She guarded Lucy as she slept. Gwilanna returns and finds the hole. She notices Lucy and the female bear. She decides tiredly to leave them be. David gets Liz to tell her who Arthur is after Gadzooks gave him the name out of nowhere. After hearing the cruel things Gwilanna did to break-up Arthur and Liz, he travels to Farlowe Island to find Arthur. Arthur goes by life on a religious island. He chooses the name Brother Vincent. He goes through a lot on the island. In fact, he survives a vicious Fain attack . David arrives at the island and calms down the scared yet vicious Grockle. Grockle flies to the Arctic when David tells him to. After a while of introductions and explanations, Arthur teaches David how to use Dr. Bergstrom''s mysterious talisman to teleport from place to place. David teleports to the Arctic and battles the very same Fain to the death. The Fain stabs two spears of ice through David''s chest, but David won''t die because the ice is really Gawain''s fire tear. After revealing the secret of the ice to the Fain, the spirit of Ingavar punches the Fain out of the body of Tootega, the Inuit whose body the Fain had possessed, killing Tootega, and the Fain. Zanna, in tears, comes running over to David. They get locked in a heart-breaking conversation. After assuring her they''d meet once more and giving her a Valentine''s Day gift, (a new dragon, G''lant, which you can only see if you really believe in dragons) he parts from Zanna. Some polar bears take David''s body on a piece of ice, Ingavars spirit lays down by his head and the polar bears pound the ice and send David and Ingavar into the water. Back at home, after releasing Snigger into the wild after his kidnapping by Gwilanna, Zanna tells Liz, Lucy and Arthur that she is pregnant with David''s baby.

Fire Star

The book''s central crime is a murder, which takes place before the novel opens. (This is an Asimovian trademark, which he attributed to his own squeamishness and John Campbell''s advice of beginning as late in the story as possible.) Roj Nemmenuh Sarton, a Spacer Ambassador, lives in Spacetown, the Spacer outpost just outside New York City. For some time, he has tried to convince the Earth government to loosen its anti-robot restrictions. One morning, he is discovered outside his home, his chest imploded by an energy blaster. The New York police commissioner charges Elijah with finding the murderer. Elijah must work with a Spacer partner, a highly advanced robot named R. Daneel Olivaw who is visually identical to a human, even though Elijah, like many Earth residents, has a low opinion of robots. Together, they search for the murderer and try to avert an interstellar diplomatic incident. One interesting aspect of the book is the contrast between Elijah, the human detective, and Daneel, the humanoid robot. Asimov uses the "mechanical" robot to inquire about human nature. When confronting a "Medievalist" who fears that robots will overcome humankind, Elijah argues that robots are inherently deficient. Being precision-engineered calculating machines, they can have no appreciation of art, beauty, or God; robots can understand only concepts expressible in mathematics. Nevertheless, in the concluding scene, R. Daneel exhibits a sense of morality. He argues that the captured murderer be treated leniently, telling his human companions that he now realizes the destruction of evil is less desirable than the conversion of evil into good. Quoting the Pericope Adulteræ, Daneel tells the murderer, "Go, and sin no more!"

The Caves of Steel

It is eighteen years after the end of the Company War, at least as stationers experience time, less for merchanters subject to the effects of time dilation in the course of their travels. Regardless, the threat of the piratical Mazianni is ebbing. The Neiharts and their superfreighter Finity''s End had spent the post-war years assisting the Alliance militia hunt down the renegades. But now the oldest of all existing merchanter families wants to return to trading. When the ship docks at Pell Station, the heart of the Alliance, the family retrieves one of its own. Fletcher Neihart''s mother had been stranded there by the fortunes of war, giving birth to him on the station. Unable to adjust to stationer life, she had committed suicide when he was five years old, leaving him to suffer through a succession of foster homes. The lonely outsider had been befriended by a couple of hisa, the gentle, intelligent natives of Pell''s World. Now a young man of seventeen with dreams of working on the planet and no wish to take up the family business, he is furious when he is handed over against his will to his relatives as part of a deal between Elene Quen, Stationmaster of Pell, and senior Captain James Robert Neihart. Finity''s End had suffered enormous casualties in the war and afterwards; half the crew died in one catastrophic decompression. Due to this and also because it was impractical to raise children in wartime, the youngest generation consists of only three orphaned "junior-juniors": Jeremy (Fletcher''s new roommate), Vince and Linda. Fletcher should have been in the same age group, but due to time dilation, he is four or five years older. Fletcher is a surly anomaly; he is as old as the more numerous "senior-juniors", but has less shipboard knowledge and experience than the junior-juniors. This is finally resolved by putting him in charge of the three youngsters. Despite a botched, unofficial initiation that results in a fistfight between Fletcher and Chad, a senior-junior cousin, the responsibility (and implied trust) as well as his friendship with Jeremy gradually reconcile him to his new life. Even the initially hostile Vince and Linda look to him for leadership and approval. It all comes crashing down when Fletcher''s spirit stick, a valuable gift from the hisa Satin (from Downbelow Station), is stolen. Suspicion and distrust grow on both sides. When Chad provokes another fight, Jeremy finally confesses that he was responsible. To safeguard the artifact from resentful relatives, he had hidden it in his hotel room at their last stop, Mariner, only to have it stolen. The merchanter Champlain is one of the suspects. Meanwhile, Captain Neihart has vastly more important issues to deal with. He is trying to shut down the smugglers and the black market, from which the Mazianni resupply themselves. At every port of call, he forges agreements with merchanters, Union and stationmasters to bring about a transition to peacetime, legitimate trade. When they find Champlain docked at their next stop, Esperance, Jeremy drags Fletcher to various curio stores, hoping to find the spirit stick. He succeeds, but as the senior captains are locked in vital negotiations, Fletcher is instructed to keep his charges in the sleepover to wait. However, the impatient twelve-year-old Jeremy takes it upon himself to go back to the shop and try to shoplift it, leading to his capture. Fletcher attempts to rescue Jeremy but is caught as well. As they are being led away at gunpoint to be quietly disposed of, Fletcher manages to engineer their escape. The resulting investigation pressures the corrupt, reluctant stationmaster into agreeing with Captain Neihart''s proposals. Fletcher wins the approval of his family and he accepts Finity''s End as his new home.

Finity''s End

It''s New Year''s Day 1975 at the beginning of the novel, and we are introduced to Archie Jones, a 47-year-old man whose disturbed Italian wife has just walked out on him. Archie is attempting to commit suicide by gassing himself in his car, when a chance interruption causes him to change his mind. Filled with a fresh enthusiasm for life, Archie flips a coin and finds his way into the aftermath of a New Year''s Eve party. There he meets the much-younger Clara, a Jamaican woman whose mother is a devout Jehovah''s Witness. They are soon married and have a daughter, Irie, who grows up to be intelligent but with low self-confidence. Samad, who has emigrated to Britain after World War II, has married Alsana. Alsana is also much younger than he is, and their union is the product of a traditional arranged marriage. They have twin boys, Magid and Millat, who are the same age as Irie. The marriage is quite rocky, as their devotion to Islam in an English life is troublesome. Samad is continually tormented by what he sees as the effects of this cultural conflict upon his own moral character and sends 10-year-old Magid to Bangladesh in the hope that he will grow up properly under the teachings of Islam. From then on, the lives of the two boys follow very different paths. Ironically, Magid becomes an atheist and devotes his life to science (a grave disappointment to Samad). Whereas Millat, despite his earlier womanizing and drinking, eventually becomes an angry fundamentalist and part of a Muslim brotherhood known as the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (or KEVIN). The lives of the Jones and Iqbal families intertwine with that of the Chalfens, a Jewish-Catholic family of Cambridge educated intellectuals. The father, Marcus Chalfen, is a brilliant but socially inept geneticist working on a controversial ''FutureMouse'' project. The mother, Joyce Chalfen, is a part-time housewife with an often entirely misguided desire to mother and ''heal'' Millat. Although they wish to be thought of as intellectual liberals, the Chalfens often demonstrate complete cultural ignorance and a blindness to the changes happening in their own family. Later on in the story, Clara''s mother, a strict Jehovah''s Witness, becomes involved along with Clara''s ex-boyfriend when Irie runs away from home. Returned from Bangladesh, Magid works as Marcus'' research assistant, while Millat is befriended by the Chalfens. To some extent the family provides a safe haven as they (believe themselves to) accept and understand the turbulent lives of Magid and Millat. However, this sympathy comes at the expense of their own son, Josh, whose difficulties are ignored by his parents as he, too, begins to rebel against his background. The strands of the narrative grow closer as Millat and KEVIN, Josh and a radical animal rights group (FATE), and Clara''s mother (Hortense) and her religious connections all begin to oppose FutureMouse as an evil interference with their own beliefs and plan to stop it. Irie, who has been working for Marcus, briefly succeeds in her long-hidden attraction to Millat but is rejected under his KEVIN-inspired beliefs. Irie believes that Millat cannot love her, for he has always been ''the second son'' both symbolically and literally; Millat was born two minutes after Magid. After losing her virginity to Millat, she makes Magid the ''second son'' for a change by sleeping with him right after. This causes her to become pregnant, and she is left unsure of the father of her child, as the brothers are identical twins. Extraordinary consequences result as the seemingly divergent stories of the main characters coalesce in a stunning finale—the unveiling of FutureMouse, the revelatory actions of the warring groups, and of a long-kept secret from Samad and Archie''s past.

White Teeth

The Quantum Rose is a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast folktale in a science fiction setting. In the novel, Kamoj Argali, the governor of an impoverished province on the backward planet Balumil, is betrothed to Jax Ironbridge, ruler of a wealthy neighboring province, an arrangement made for political purposes to save her province from starvation and death. Havyrl (Vyrl) Lionstar, a prince of the titular Ruby Dynasty, comes to Balimul as part of a governmental plan to deal with the aftermath of an interstellar war. Masked and enigmatic, he has a reputation as a monster with Kamoj''s people. Lionstar interferes with Kamoj''s culture and destabilizes their government by pushing her into marriage with himself. In the traditional fairy tale, Belle must save her father from the prince transformed into a beast; in The Quantum Rose, Kamoj must save her province from the prince in exile. The book deals with themes about the physical and emotional scars left on the survivors of a war with no clear victor. As such, it is also a story of healing for both Kamoj and Lionstar. The second half of The Quantum Rose involves Lionstar''s return to his home world with Kamoj, where he becomes the central figure in a planet wide act of civil disobedience designed to eject an occupying military force that has taken control of his planet. Both the world Balimul in the first half of the novel and the world Lyshriol in the second half fall into the lost colony genre of literature in science fiction.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Fablehaven

By Brandon Mull

Austerlitz

By W. G. Sebald

The First Four Years

By Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Ravi Lancers

No Author Listed

Always Hiding

By Sophia Romero

The Paper Chase

By John Jay Osborn, Jr.

The Battle of the Labyrinth

By Rick Riordan

Fire Star

By Chris D''Lacey

The Caves of Steel

By Isaac Asimov

Finity's End

By C. J. Cherryh

White Teeth

By Zadie Smith

The Quantum Rose

By Catherine Asaro