While looking at a cottage with her friend Mrs. May, Kate discovers that the present tenant, Tom Goodenough, knew Arrietty Clock, a tiny "Borrower" that Mrs. May''s brother claimed to have met. He tells her what happened to Arrietty and her parents after they were driven from their original home in an old, English house. Homeless, they are forced to live outside. When they discover that the relatives they had hoped to stay with are nowhere to be found, they take up residence in an old boot. Arrietty meets a mysterious, wild Borrower named Spiller who assists them by bringing them meat and saves Arrietty''s life from a dog. Although nearly everything outside - cows, moths, field mice, cold weather - is a life-threatening danger for the tiny Borrowers, they learn how to survive in the wild. One night the boot''s owner, a gypsy named Mild Eye, discovers his lost property and brings them back to his caravan. With the help of the human boy Tom Goodenough, Spiller rescues them and leads them on to the their next home, the cottage that Tom lives in. There the Clocks find their long-lost relatives and Arrietty finds a friend in Tom.

The Borrowers Afield

It is 1540 and the hottest summer of the sixteenth century. Matthew Shardlake, believing himself out of favour with Thomas Cromwell, is busy trying to maintain his legal practice and keep a discreet profile. But his involvement with a murder case, defending a girl accused of brutally murdering her young cousin, brings him once again into contact with the king''s chief minister &ndash; and a new assignment ... The secret of Greek Fire, the legendary substance with which the Byzantines destroyed the Arab navies, has been lost for centuries. Now an official of the Court of Augmentations has discovered the formula in the library of a dissolved London monastery. When Shardlake is sent to recover it, he finds the official and his alchemist brother brutally murdered &ndash; the formula has disappeared. Now Shardlake must follow the trail of Greek Fire across Tudor London, while trying at the same time to prove his young client''s innocence. But very soon he discovers nothing is as it seems ...

Dark Fire

Frank Pollard wakes up in an alley at night, filled with confusion and fear. He knows nothing but his name, and that he must escape fast, or else he will be killed. Pursued by a mysterious assailant, Frank barely escapes with his life. Every time he goes to sleep, he wakes up to find evidence of bizarre nighttime travels which he cannot remember. Afraid of his own actions, Frank enlists the help of husband-wife security team, Bobby and Julie Dakota. At first, the case merely seems absurd, but as they track deeper into the life and past of the mysterious Frank Pollard, the Dakotas uncover an increasingly bizarre and dangerous world threatened by a madman who thirsts for blood. It is ultimately revealed that Frank Pollard is the brother to the mysterious madman as well as twin sisters. They were born from a mother who was the product of an incestuous relationship. Her father was a hallucinogenic drug-abuser and her mother was his sister. She is a hermaphrodite and impregnated herself with her own seed. As a result of this compounded inbreeding, Frank and his siblings developed unusual psychic abilities. Frank, wanting a normal life, tries to escape from his family while being pursued by his brother who seeks to either bring him back or kill him, and nothing will stand in his way. After a message from Julie''s younger brother, who has Down Syndrome and possesses minor psychic ability himself, Bobby, Julie, Frank and his family begin speeding into a final confrontation.

The Bad Place

World at the End of Time follows the story of a young Earth-born human, Viktor Sorricaine, on a colony expedition to a distant star system. The colonists are frozen for the long trip between stars. Unknown to both the humans of Earth and the colonists, the stars around them are home to immensely long-lived (effectively immortal) plasma creatures—with no knowledge of, or interest in, the activities of insignificant matter creatures. Wan-To, one of the oldest and most powerful plasma creatures, is engaged in a war. After creating modified copies of himself, or "children", for company, Wan-To finds himself in a deadly game of chess with them. The "board" is the entire galaxy and the weapons are the stars themselves. Each star may be home to an enemy "child"... and using a variety of exotic particles, Wan-To is able to cause a targeted star to flare and kill any enemy that may be living within it. Into the middle of this battlefield, the three colony ships (Ark, New Mayflower and Argosy) unwittingly head for their new home. Upon arriving, the colony begins to establish itself ... only to discover that their entire local group of stars appears to be undergoing a bizarre acceleration, and are dimming. After a disastrous disease outbreak and terraforming failures, the desperate colonists eventually decide to investigate the strange radiation emissions from a small world within their solar system. Upon arriving in orbit, their ship is badly damaged and Viktor is forced into the onboard freezer systems. They are eventually rescued and unfrozen four hundred of the colony''s years later, to find the colony in an even more desperate situation. The star around which the colony''s world orbits has dimmed considerably (due to the energy being siphoned off to accelerate it) and they are now travelling so fast that, due to relativistic effects, the universe around them has shrunk to a bright dot. The colony has become factionalized and heavily religious, with scientific investigation discouraged. Viktor is eventually frozen again for attempting to investigate why they have been accelerating. He wakes four thousand of the colony''s years later, to find the far descendants of the colony have rebuilt their society into habitats closely orbiting their binary star system''s secondary (a small red dwarf) and created a high-technology civilization dedicated to pleasure and comfort. He makes his way, eventually, to the former colony to find only a few fellow-colonists unfrozen and attempting to rebuild it. His unique status as someone who was born on "old Earth" brings publicity to their efforts and the rebuilding forges ahead. During the four thousand years of Viktor''s frozen sleep, the star system has been slowed again. Unfortunately, after the vast amount of time that has passed, all that remains of the once young universe are dead stars and black holes ... and Wan-To desperately surviving on the energy provided by proton decay. Wan-To receives a tachyon transmission from his long-forgotten systems and makes preparations to move into these last remaining stars — believing that the small matter creatures inhabiting the system are irrelevant and can be destroyed should they become an irritation.

The World at the End of Time

This story begins with Garrett being approached by a beautiful young woman by the name of Jill Craight. She hires Garrett to help find out who has been breaking into her apartment and why. Immediately after, a Magister Peridont comes to Garrett to try to get him to investigate the disappearance of some religious relics; Garrett respectfully declines. After getting attacked by a gang called the Vampires, Garrett goes to his old friend Maya, leader of a gang herself, for advice. Maya informs Garrett that Jill was a former member of the Doom, Maya''s gang, and that she is a chronic liar. Sensing Garrett needs help, Maya invites herself along for the rest of the adventure. Garrett and Maya continue their investigation, but unfortunately, Garrett has no leads and isn''t even quite sure what to investigate. Garrett''s one clue is some mysterious coinage tying together Jill and the Vampires. Garrett asks Magister Peridont about the coins, then heads over to the Royal Assay office for help. After learning nothing new, Garrett heads home, where he is visited again by Magister Peridont, who informs him that Miss Craight was in fact his mistress, and now she is missing. The story gets more complicated when Garrett visits Chodo Contague, whose house gets attacked by magical forces. Chodo Contague involves his henchmen more earnestly in Garrett''s case, and Garrett and Maya take their search for Jill to the Tenderloin, the red-light district of TunFaire. When they return home, they find the same magical forces that attacked Chodo''s mansion trying to tear apart Garrett''s home. After taking care of them, the Dead Man intervenes, letting Garrett know that there is another dead Loghyr involved in the magical attacks. Eventually, Garrett and the Dead Man manage to tie together the roles of the Church, the missing relics, the dead Loghyr, and Jill Craight. After discovering that Jill is hiding out in a church complex, Garrett and Morley break in and kidnap Jill and another of her lovers, a high status member of the Orthodox church. Garrett assembles everyone of importance at his house, and he and the Dead Man uncover the motives of all the parties present. Eventually, the relics are recovered, the other dead Loghyr is disposed of, and Garrett lives to tackle another adventure.

Cold Copper Tears

Adam is an eleven-year-old who wants to become like his father, Roger, and to do so he tries to be the best minstrel in England. Beginning of the story, Adam and his friend Perkin are in St. Alban''s monastery, where they go to an old lady''s house to visit Adam''s dog, Nick. They quickly return to their home at the monastery and go to the roadside to find Roger is coming back from his long journey as a knight''s minstrel. Roger tells Adam that he is going to London to follow in the knight''s train. Adam is allowed to come, but he must hurry because the knight leaves the next day. While on the road, Adam meets Margery, the daughter of the knight, in a beautiful carriage. Soon after, following a night of feasting and partying, Roger tells Adam he lost his warhorse, Bayard, in a bet with another minstrel. One night, while Roger and Adam are sleeping, Bayard trades Nick to another minstrel, Jankin. Adam worries that Jankin will mistreat Nick. When Adam and Roger discover Nick is gone, they chase Jankin across England. When Adam sees Jankin in a crowded marketplace, he pursues him and is separated from Roger. Adam makes friends and eventually finds Nick with Perkin. Roger, Adam and Nick are eventually reunited in Oxford. Adam is offered a place at Oxford college, but decides to be a minstrel, like his father.

Adam of the Road

A Journey covers Blair''s time as leader of the Labour Party and then British Prime Minister following his party''s victory at the 1997 general election. His tenure as Labour leader begins in 1994 following the death of his predecessor, John Smith, an event Blair claims to have had a premonition about a month before Smith died. Blair believes he will succeed Smith as Labour leader rather than Gordon Brown, who is a strong contender for the job. He likens them both to "a couple who loved each other, arguing over whose career should come first." To him, Brown is a "strange guy". with "zero" emotional intelligence. Having been elected as leader Blair moves the Labour Party to the political centre ground, repackaging it as "New Labour", and goes on to win the 1997 general election. At his first meeting with Elizabeth II following his election as Prime Minister Blair recalls the Queen telling him, "You are my tenth prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born." Within a few months his government must deal with the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and following the Princess''s funeral, Elizabeth&nbsp;II tells Blair that lessons must be learned from the way things have been handled. Social occasions with the Queen are also recalled, including a gathering at Balmoral Castle where Prince Philip is described manning the barbecue while Elizabeth&nbsp;II dons a pair of rubber gloves to wash up afterwards. From the outset Blair''s government plays a significant role in the Northern Ireland peace process, during which Blair admits to using "a certain amount of creative ambiguity" to secure an agreement, claiming the process would not have succeeded otherwise. He says that he stretched the truth "on occasions past breaking point" in the run-up to the 2007 power-sharing deal which enabled the return of devolved legislative powers from Westminster to the Northern Ireland Executive. Both Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin are praised for the part they played in the peace process. One of the themes that dominates the latter part of Blair''s time in office is his decision to join U.S. President George W. Bush in committing troops to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the aftermath of which he describes as a "nightmare", but that he believes to have been necessary because Saddam Hussein "had not abandoned the strategy of WMD [weapons of mass destruction], merely made a tactical decision to put it into abeyance". He would make the same decision again with regard to Iran, warning that if that country develops nuclear weapons it will change the balance of power of the Middle East, to the region''s detriment. Blair believes some problems in Iraq still require a "resolution" and will fester if left unattended. Of the war dead he says, "I feel desperately sorry for them, sorry for the lives cut short, sorry for the families whose bereavement is made worse by the controversy over why their loved ones died, sorry for the utterly unfair selection that the loss should be theirs." A year on from the invasion he hopes Bush will win a second term as U.S. President: "I had come to like and admire George," he writes. In 2003, Blair promises his Chancellor, Gordon Brown that he will resign before the next general election, but later changes his mind. Brown subsequently attempts to blackmail him, threatened to call for a Labour Party inquiry into the 2005 cash for honours affair during an argument over pension policy. Brown succeeds Blair as Labour Party leader and Prime Minister in 2007. But while Blair praises Brown as a good Chancellor and a committed public servant, he believes his decision to abandon the New Labour policies of the Blair years leads to the party''s 2010 election defeat. However, Brown is right to restructure British banks and introduce an economic stimulus after the financial crisis. The book closes with a final chapter offering a critique of Labour Party policy, and discusses its future. Blair warns Brown''s successor that if Labour is to remain electable they should continue with the policies of New Labour and not return to the left-wing policies of the 1980s: "I won three elections. Up to then, Labour had never even won two successive full terms. The longest Labour government had lasted six years. This lasted 13. It could have gone on longer, had it not abandoned New Labour."

A Journey

Shortly after the Dagoola IV escape detailed in the novella "Borders of Infinity", Miles and some of his Dendarii mercenaries arrive on Earth, fleeing Cetagandan retribution and desperate to repair the damage suffered by their ships. Miles visits the Barrayaran Embassy so the Dendarii can be paid for their last mission. There he finds his cousin Ivan Vorpatril working for the distinctly hostile Captain Duv Galeni, who turns out to be a Komarran related to one of the alleged victims of Miles'' father. Miles is reassigned to the Embassy as Third Military Attaché, under Galeni''s command. Further complicating matters, Miles discovers he has a clone, created and trained as an assassin by Komarran diehards determined to free their planet. The assassination plot is foiled. Miles allows his clone to escape; by Betan law, the clone is his brother, and Miles is well aware his formidable mother would be greatly displeased if he got rid of his troublesome new sibling. According to Barrayaran tradition, his brother would be named Mark Pierre Vorkosigan. In exchange for "Mark" helping Miles fool the Cetagandans, who are beginning to suspect that Naismith and Vorkosigan are the same person, the psychologically scarred Mark is let go with a considerable sum of money and the invitation to claim his Barrayaran heritage, if he wants to&mdash;or dares.

Brothers in Arms

Scene of the novel is Norway in year 1911. Nineteen-year-old shopkeepersdaughter Cornelia Weding has lived with a terrifying and inexplicable memory since the age of five. She has tried to deny it, but it comes back recurrently into her mind in the shape of feelings, words and nightmares. In the memory fragments she wambers as a child alone in the hard of night-time and dark forest and searching for something or the enormous and frightening figures in the black capes stays round her baby bed and threaten to kill her if she would remember. As her missfortune her loved childhood friend will get married to her beautiful and evil cousin. When she takes a trip to their weddings her stepmother''s childhood home, she realizes that she has returned to the place where the dark mystery happened fourteen years ago... :Characters: * Cornelia Weding, the principal character. Nineteen-year-old shopkeepersdaughter, who lives with her traumatic memory. Has light strawberry red hair, childish face and surprise of the all world in her wise eyes. * Anna Weding, 24 years old, Cornelia''s elder sister. Has the darker hair and skin than Cornelia. Brave, straightforward and outspoken. Her and a lieutenant Sofus Hallgren are seeing each other. * Pontus Weding, 26 years old, Cornelia''s and Anna''s elder brother. Pontus has grew up the lamppost, very long and inflexible man. He studies. * Jon, 29 years old, a neighbour boy from childhood of Cornelia and her secret love, who will get married to Cornelia''s cousin Missy. Studies farming far away from home. * Lars, 26 years old, Jon''s younger brother. Silent, interested in cars and has one. * Mari-Lise, called "Missy", 26 years old, a cat woman, the Cornelia''s and Anna''s and Pontus'' cousin. However, she''s not a relative of theirs, because she is the niece of brother''s and sister''s stepmother. Beautiful and evil seduceress; has thick and copper red hair. She hates Cornelia. * Sofus Hallgren, lieutenant, Anna''s dearly loved. Visits often in the shore owned by Cornelia''s father. * Christoffer Weding, shopkeeper and Cornelia''s, Anna''s, Pontus'' and two little children''s father. The sensible and understanding man. * Matilda Weding is his wife, but three eldest siblings of the committee of five children flock isn''t her, because their mother died when Cornelia was born. Matilda is a nagging, silly and vain woman, who favours just her own relatives (especially her niece Missy). She thinks that her family is the better people complete to Wedings because of their noble birth (her grandmother was a noblewoman). * Hans and Grethe, Matilda''s and Christoffer''s two little children. Don''t play great role in the novel; they are only sweet and laborious, final turns in the family. * Agnes, Matilda''s sister and Missy''s mother who has cold, ice blue eyes. She is married with the rich and imposing Knut Jörgen. Agnes'' personality is quite similar to her sister''s. * Knut Jörgen, the rich and imposing, authority figure in the family, who get married with Agnes after that her former husband went missing. Even though he looks externally a firm and decisive man, he yields without difficulty to his wife''s complaining and spoils too much his vain half daughter. * Grandmother, who hasn''t a proper noun in the novel. She wears an old-fashioned black dress, haughty and dignifieldly behaving old lady who doesn''t consider her daughter''s husband candidates by fair means if they don''t come from enough noble estate. However, she has a heart under her hard exterior and has more sense than her silly daughters has altogether. * Alfred Pettersen, the Agnes'' former husband and Missy''s father. The grandmother didn''t like him. A pretty rascal, and no-one has ever heard about him since he escaped with circus ballerina many years ago. sv:Den mörka sanningen

Den mörka sanningen

Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese man. In 1929, a 15 year old nameless girl is traveling by ferry across the Mekong Delta, returning from a holiday at her family home in the town of Sa Đéc, to her boarding school in Saigon. She attracts the attention of a 37 year old son of a Chinese business magnate, a young man of wealth and heir to a fortune. He strikes up a conversation with the girl; she accepts a ride back to town in his chauffeured limousine. Compelled by the circumstances of her upbringing, this girl, the daughter of a bankrupt, manic depressive widow, is newly awakened to the impending and all-too-real task of making her way alone in the world. Thus, she becomes his lover, until he bows to the disapproval of his father and breaks off the affair. For her lover, there is no question of the depth and sincerity of his love, but it isn''t until much later that the girl acknowledges to herself her true feelings.

The Lover

In the tale and in Shirley''s retelling, Death and Cupid accidentally exchange their arrows and cause chaos as a result. Cupid shoots potential lovers and inadvertently kills them. Death shoots at elderly people whose time of passing has come, and strikes them ardent instead; he shoots duellists about to fight, and they drop their swords to embrace and dance and sing. The "serious" portion of the masque features the kind of personifications standard in the masque form: Nature, Folly, Madness, and Despair. As usual in masques of Shirley''s era, the work contains a comic anti-masque, with a tavern Host and a Chamberlain, and a dance of "Satyrs and Apes." (The poor Chamberlain is struck by Death with Cupid''s arrow, and falls in love with an ape.) The god Mercury eventually intervenes to set things right; Cupid is banished from the courts of princes to common people''s cottages (a suitably sober moral for the Puritan regime then in power). The slain lovers are shown rejoicing in Elysium. "Cupid and Death resembles Caroline masque in its use of staging, music, dance, singing and dialogue. Yet it differs in that the masquers take part in the action and they do not dance with the audience at the end...The balance between spoken prose dialogue, recitative and song carries the performance away from masque and towards opera, a form Davenant planned to introduce to the London stage as early as 1639." Cupid and Death was performed at Rutland Boughton''s Glastonbury Festival in 1919, by the Consorte of Musicke (notably Anthony Rooley and Emma Kirkby) in 1985, and by the Halastó Kórus (directed by Göttinger Pál) in Budapest in 2008.

Cupid and Death

Paul Osborn sees the man who has murdered his father years before while walking through Paris. When he sees the murderer again his memories take over. After a detective found out about Henri Kanarack, Osborn plans to kill him. McVey comes to Paris in order to meet some experts on the case of a couple decapitations, where the bodies and heads were found deep-frozen. A few days later Osborn tries to kill Kanarack, but when he''s nearly dead a third person enters the scene. He shoots Kanarack and the last information Osborn could get from Kanarack was that he was murdering Osborn''s father for hire of Erwin Scholl. Osborn tells McVey about Scholl. Out of McVey''s researches arises that Osborn''s father invented a scalpel that can be used at degrees of absolute zero and that in the same year he was killed a few other inventors were killed, whose inventions were all about surgery at extremely high or low temperatures and all vanished. Because of that McVey and his investigation team have a suspicion that Scholl and his people might belong to an organization that''s working on surgery making it possible to combine deep-frozen body parts and to thaw it so the person is alive. Time passes, and McVey finds out about Elton Lybarger and a ceremony that should be held in Berlin. During this in the main hall of the building Elton Lybarger is giving the speech. Suddenly all doors close and all people inside the main hall are gassed with cyanide gas. Right after the cyanide attack the building is set to fire and Osborn nearly perishes. After Osborn followed Von Holden, the only remaining organization member, to Switzerland and is nearly killed McVey gives Osborn a VCR tape, on which Osborn finds a whole confession of Elton Lybarger''s physician. He confesses having experienced the surgery on Lybarger, because they were searching for a person, whose attributes and fingerprints were as much as the same as Adolf Hitler''s, and having helped the organization, who was trying to build a new third Reich, to raise Lybarger''s two “nephews”, the perfect Aryans, who were raised with him since they were young. According to Salettl one of them should be the new leader after having undergone an operation. Osborn can''t remember exactly what happened in Switzerland, but then the scene replays in his mind. He sees how Van holden falls into a crevasse and how he opens the package Von Holden had been carrying with him all the time, and it''s the deep-frozen head of Adolf Hitler.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

The Borrowers Afield

By Mary Norton

Dark Fire

By C. J. Sansom

The Bad Place

By Dean Koontz

The World at the End of Time

By Frederik Pohl

Cold Copper Tears

By Glen Cook

Adam of the Road

By Elizabeth Gray Vining

A Journey

By Anthony Blair

Brothers in Arms

By Lois McMaster Bujold

Den mörka sanningen

By Margit Sandemo

The Lover

By Marguerite Duras

Cupid and Death

No Author Listed

The Day After Tomorrow

No Author Listed