Page Clarke is a 40-year-old-happily married woman who lives with her 44 year old husband Brad Clarke, her 15 year old daughter Allyson and 7 year old son Andrew. One night Brad goes on an unexpected business trip to Cleveland and Allyson reports she is going to have dinner with her friend Chloe and Chloe''s father Trygve Thorensen. Instead Allyson goes out with Chloe and two older boys named Jamie Applegate and Phillip Chapman. While crossing the Golden Gate Bridge the teenagers have an accident with supposed senator''s wife Laura Hutchinson. Phillip is killed; Jamie survives with only a small cut; Chloe suffers leg damage, a broken pelvis and a shattered hip; and Allyson has severe head trauma. Both girls are rushed to the hospital and both Trygve and Page arrive before the surgeries. Page is unable to reach Brad until after the surgery has begun, and Brad is outraged that she did not consult him beforehand. She tells him that Allyson would have died at six''o''clock if the surgery had not been performed. One hour later, Brad arrives at the hospital and leaves for their house before Page does. Later, Page confronts him as to why he is home early from his "trip" and he confesses that he has been cheating on her. Soon afterwards Brad starts disappearing several times. Eventually Page''s mother, Maribelle and sister Alexis arrive in San Francisco and laze about the house while Allison remains in the hospital. One night after dinner, Page rages at her mother, demanding why she pretends that she did not know that her father molested her and her sister when they were children. Soon she forces Brad to move out and sends her mother and sister back to New York. By then she and Trygve had confessed their feelings toward each other. For four months, Allyson remains in a coma and Andrew, who has attempted to run away, is taken to see his sister. Soon Trygve and his children Nick, Bjorn and Chloe go to a lake for the weekend, and Allyson awakens from her coma. When Page goes to join them at the lake, she confesses to Trygve that she is pregnant with his child, and they begin to plan their wedding. fr:Accident (roman)

Accident

Carruthers, a minor official in the Foreign Office is contacted by an acquaintance, Davies, asking him to join in a yachting holiday in the Baltic Sea. Carruthers agrees, as his other plans for a holiday have fallen through. He arrives to find that Davies has a small sailing boat (the vessel was named Dulcibella, a reference to Childers''s own sister of that name), not the comfortable crewed yacht that he expected. Davies gradually reveals that he suspects that the Germans are undertaking something sinister in the German Frisian islands, based on his belief that he was nearly wrecked by a German yacht luring him into a shoal in rough weather. Carruthers and Davies sail back to the Frisian Islands and spend some time exploring the shallow tidal waters of the area, moving closer to the mysterious site where there is a rumoured secret treasure recovery project in progress. They are watched by a German navy patrol boat, which warns them away from the area. Taking advantage of a thick fog, Davies navigates them covertly through the complicated sandbanks in a small boat to investigate the site. They find that it is actually the centre of a German plan to invade England. The invasion plan is master-minded by a renegade Englishman, but Davies has fallen in love with his daughter and he does not want to hurt her by revealing her father''s treason. Eventually they manage to escape with the information and the invasion plan is foiled.

The Riddle of the Sands

The novel is set in Regency England somewhere around 1818, and events are related through third-person narrative. As the story opens, a wealthy, beautiful and intelligent woman named Annis Wychwood reaches the age of majority. Now having greater control over her personal and financial affairs, Annis decides to move to Bath and live alone, to the displeasure of her brother and his family. Several years later, on the way back to Bath after a visit to her childhood home, Annis meets Lucilla Carleton and Ninian Elmore. Lucilla is running away to Bath to avoid her marriage to Ninian, a match that her guardian is very much in favor of, and Ninian is escorting her to ensure her safe arrival. Annis volunteers to chaperone Lucilla and notifies the girl''s guardian of her plans. Lucilla''s guardian sends a relative, Oliver Carleton, to investigate her new living arrangements. Carleton is a rake&nbsp;– a sexually experienced man who refuses to conform to many of society''s guidelines. His biting wit has earned him the label of rudest man in England, but he and Annis soon find mutual enjoyment in lively banter. As Carleton and Annis''s friendship develops, they discover deeper feelings for each other. Carleton proposes marriage, but Annis refuses, unwilling to relinquish her independence. Using the excuse that he must find Lucilla a new guardian, Carleton returns to London. Annis''s brother, Sir Geoffrey Wychwood, hears rumors of her developing relationship with Carleton and sends his wife and children to Bath to discourage Carleton. Soon after their arrival members of the household contract influenza, and Annis nurses them until she too becomes infected. When Carleton hears that Annis is seriously ill he returns to Bath, arriving on the first day that she is able to get out of bed. Annis agrees to marry Carleton, despite the objections of her brother.

Lady of Quality

Frankensteins of Fraud covers the following criminals and their activities: *Charles Ponzi, father of the Ponzi scheme who arrived in America with as little as $2.50 dollars in his pocket and soon grew to earn millions by conning thousands of working people. *Cassie Chadwick, the daughter of Andrew Carnegie who was supposed to inherit $400 million had her opportunities created for her by tons of banks agreeing to loan her big money for interest rates going off the roofs, little did they know they couldn''t fool the most notorious woman of her time. *Ivar Kreuger made billions until he was destroyed by the stock market crash of 1929. *Phillip Musica, aka F. Donald Coster, M.D., Ph.D also the CEO of McKesson and Robbins Pharmaceuticals swindled millions of dollars from his own company. *Robert Vesco, whose handling of mutual funds led to the SEC making him a fugitive and sending him on a 30 year crime spree until he was caught. *Stanley Goldblum, most famous for his 2 billion dollar Equity Funding Insurance Scam. *John Bennett who used charitable organizations to come up with his very own Ponzi scheme along with "Crazy Eddie", Mark Whitacre and Michael Milken.

Frankensteins of Fraud

In 2009, humans make contact with their first extraterrestrials. The signal comes from beyond Neptune and even Pluto, on 1999 ZX, a celestial body between comet and planet in size, out in the Kuiper belt at 35 AU from the Sun. Twenty years later they send a scientific team to this small, ice-bound planetoid in the farthest reaches of the solar system in the Oort cloud. This cold, dark planetoid ends up being a strange world indeed. There is only a thin hydrogen atmosphere, almost vacuum, and the average temperature is some 30&nbsp;K (-243&nbsp;°C), where only hydrogen, helium, and neon are gaseous in state and nearly everything else is a solid. Yet on this icy, frozen world, life manages to thrive: the keracks, which are no bigger than a few centimeters in length resemble "large one-eyed prawns dressed in elaborate clothing". The keracks, despite their small size, have built rather small cities and developed a complex society on their planetoid which they dubbed "Ice". They have a collectivistic hive-like society with a rich culture suggesting that of England in the time of King Arthur. The human visitors'' first contact is the female kerack Merlene, wizard of the kerack city of Camalor. The humans themselves, being too hot and large, are unsuited for direct contact with the natives on this chilly world. So, instead, they have built "telebots" through which they can communicate with Merlene and the other keracks. Merlene develops a fondness for conversing with the humans and eventually the humans and the keracks get to learn much about each others'' worlds and cultures. The humans also teach Merlene more about science and technology which would hopefully advance the kerack race. The human scientists also uncover mysteries about the energy source of the keracks, who secrete an internal pellet of Uranium and moderate its decay with a Boron-rich carapace to provide internal warmth. Whenever a kerack dies its pellet is taken to be stockpiled by the colony''s queen. The scientists discover the tragic conclusion of the kerack life cycle almost too late to save Merlene; when a kerack colony accumulated a large enough stockpile the queen would instinctively arrange it in such a way as to trigger a nuclear explosion, blasting kerack spores off of the Kuiper belt object to colonize other objects in the belt. Since the kerack colony is exploded in the process no living kerack had known of their fate. The book concludes with Merlene going traveling to warn other colonies of the consequences of their expanding stockpiles.

Camelot 30K

This book consists of two main plot threads, which only come together towards the end of the book. The majority of the first half of the story is devoted to a plot where a variety of hominid species from the ring join together to kill a large nest of vampires (the shadow nest) which has been feeding on all of them. Some of the characters are also found in The Ringworld Engineers, as early on in this book Niven tells us that relatively few of the hominids died when Louis Wu and the Hindmost restabilised the ring at the end of the previous book. The second part of the book details the continuing adventures of Louis Wu, who is now aging and ill. Eventually he returns to the Hindmost and is healed, only for the pair of them—and also a Kzin called Acolyte, who is Chmee''s son—to be enslaved by a vampire protector. What follows is a power struggle between Protectors on the rim wall and the vampire protectors who have control of the ringworld''s defences. In many of the situations in this section of the book Louis, the Hindmost and Acolyte are present only as observers, as it is the Protectors who are the main protagonists of the story.

The Ringworld Throne

As with the first novel, the book focuses on the efforts of Mitchell Gant to steal the fictional prototype MiG-31 Firefox Soviet aircraft. At the climax of Firefox, Gant engaged in combat with a second MiG-31; the second novel begins mere moments later, with Gant discovering that his aircraft sustained damage in the dogfight and is losing fuel rapidly. After a brief engagement with two Soviet MiG-25s, Gant lands the Firefox onto a frozen Finnish lake. Upon fleeing the lake, Gant is captured by the KGB and taken back to the Soviet Union. The West must then mount a desperate attempt to recover the Firefox from the lake, repair it, and return it to flyable condition before Soviet forces can recapture or destroy it. At the same time, Gant attempts to escape the Soviet Union. Dmitri Priabin (a KGB officer with a minor role in Firefox) has an expanded role in its sequel; his lover has been working for the Americans under the codename Burgoyne, forcing Priabin to choose between recapturing Gant and saving the woman. Unlike its predecessor, Firefox Down did not become a feature film. The book, however, depicts the MiG-31 from the movie on the cover and the text of the novel describes it as black, as it was in the movie, rather than the original silver.

Firefox Down

The novel consists of five parts that tell the life of Gergely Bornemissza from the age of eight until the year 1552, when he is in his early thirties. I. Gergely is a half-orphan and son of a poor woman, while Éva Cecey is the daughter of a landowner. They are nevertheless playmates. While playing in the woods, the two children are captured by a Turk named Jumurdzsák and have to join a trek of prisoners. Due to the cunning of little Gergely, the two children are able to escape and later also to free the other prisoners. Gergely''s mother dies in a raid by the Turks, but the little boy is adopted as a foster son by the rich aristocrat Bálint Török, where he gets a good education. II. Several years later, Gergely has to experience that Buda is captured by the Turks through deceit and his foster father Bálint Török is led away prisoner. Gergely meets Éva again, who has become a pretty young girl. III. Gergely learns that Éva who is an excellent rider and fighter is to be married to the cowardly Adam Fürjes at the request of the queen. They flee together and get married. Together with some friends they plan to free Bálint Török from his prison in Istanbul. They go to the Ottoman city, but despite many adventures, they finally fail in freeing the Hungarian aristocrat. IV. It is 1552, a force about 200,000 Turks is approaching the little town of Eger, the citadel of which is only defended by 2000 soldiers. István Dobó, captain of the citadel, calls on the troops of the emperor for aid, but no-one arrives. Gergely joins the forces who are preparing to fight in Eger, while leaving Éva home with their little son. Shortly after he has left, a stranger arrives and kidnaps the little boy. Éva realizes that the stranger must have been the Turk Jumurdzsák. She understands that there must be a connection with the siege of Eger, so she masquerades as a man and tries to enter the besieged castle. V. Even though the forces of the Turks are overwhelming, the Hungarians in Eger are able to defend themselves. Éva finally arrives at Eger. Though the Ottomans attack again and again, the citadel stands firm, with also the women of Eger joining the battle. Finally, the Ottoman forces withdraw. Gergely''s and Éva''s little son is exchanged for a Turkish boy who has been captured, and the family is finally reunited.

Egri csillagok

Not so long ago a promising young short story writer, Billy Wiles has not even turned on his PC since his fiancée Barbara fell into a coma several years ago. Leading the life of a recluse who spends his spare time alone at home doing woodwork, he only leaves his secluded house when he goes to work as a bartender. An orphan, he only associates with few people, and he considers them acquaintances rather than friends. Wiles''s life takes a dramatic turn when he finds a piece of paper stuck to his windshield which contains an ultimatum (see book cover, below). He decides not to go to the police and to consult someone he knows who happens to be in the police force instead. Together, although not thoroughly convinced, the two men decide that the note must have been some sick joke. However, on the following day a cruel murder is reported which exactly fits the description given in advance by the alleged joker. Two more notes follow in quick succession, and only when they become increasingly personal does Wiles realize that he has not been chosen at random by the person he comes to think of as "the freak". For example, shortly after receiving a cryptic message saying Are you prepared for your first wound? he is physically assaulted by the mask-wearing killer. When Wiles recovers from the shock and the pain he realizes that the psychopath has driven three large fish hooks under the skin of his forehead. Acts of violence like the one depicted above lead the third person narrator to reflect on the society we live in: "Not long ago in the history of the world, routine daily violence&mdash;excluding the ravages of nations at war&mdash;had been largely personal in nature. Grudges, slights to honor, adultery, disputes over money triggered the murderous impulse. :"In the modern world, more in the postmodern, most of all in the post-postmodern, much violence had become impersonal. Terrorists, street gangs, lone sociopaths, sociopaths in groups and pledged to a utopian vision killed people they did not know, against whom they had no realistic complaint, for the purpose of attracting attention, making a statement, intimidation, or even just for the thrill of it. :"The freak, whether known or unknown to Billy, was a daunting adversary. Judging by all evidence, he was bold but not reckless, psychopathic but self-controlled, clever, ingenious, cunning, with a baroque and Machiavellian mind. :"By contrast, Billy Wiles made his way in the world as plainly and directly as he could. His mind was not baroque. His desires were not complex. He only hoped to live, and lived on guarded hope." (Chapter 14) Although Wiles does check on each of the few acquaintances he has, he cannot at first decide which of them, if any, might be the freak. Eventually he focuses his attention on Steve Zillis, one of his workmates. However, it soon turns out that Zillis has a watertight alibi for the time when some of the crimes were committed, and Wiles ends up none the wiser. Wiles has very clear reasons for not involving the police. Right from the beginning of his nightmarish adventure, he has a hunch that circumstantial evidence, possibly planted by the killer, would turn him into the prime suspect: In the eyes of the police, he would be the perpetrator rather than one of the victims. Also, as more murders are committed, he realizes that he might endanger Barbara&#39;s life. In the end Wiles finds out that the psychopath sees his crimes as a work of art rather than, say, a game (cf. for example Gentlemen & Players). He discovers that the freak is the artist, Valis, and confronts him. After a short discussion, Billy sprays Valis with Mace and shoots him dead. Returning home, Billy mistakenly assumes that he and Barbara are safe; however, when he replays the video camera, he sees Zillis in his house, and realises that Valis and Zillis were working together. He manages to catch up with Zillis before he can kill Barbara, and after driving him out into the country, kills Zillis. The book ends with Billy (now called Bill) caring for Barbara in his own home. At the very end of the book, Barbara&#39;s eyes open and she comments on a flock of Barn Swallows flying past. While her eyes close again, the ending seems promising for her imminent recovery.

Velocity

Massive environmental changes and global disease, attributed to large-scale pollution, cause the collapse of civilization around the world. One large, well-to-do extended family sets up an isolated community in an attempt to survive the coming catastrophe. However, as the death toll mounts, due to a disease and other causes, they discover that they are universally infertile. After discovering that the infertility might be reversed after multiple generations of cloning, the family begins cloning themselves to survive. It is assumed that after enough generations of clones have been created and fertility restored, that sexual reproduction will be become the norm again. However, when the clones come of-age, they reject the idea of sexual reproduction in favor of further cloning. The original members of the community, too old and outnumbered by the clones to resist, are forced to accept the new social order. As time passes, the new generations of clones eliminate the ideas of individuality from their social structure. Since they are cloned in groups of 4-10 individuals, they grow to depend on each other enormously and lose their sense of individuality, gaining in return an empathic sense of their clones. One woman, after being separated from her clones while on an expedition to find materials in the ruins of nearby cities, regains her sense of individuality; she goes on to have a child, Mark, with a man who was also on the expedition. The two are expelled from the community when Mark is discovered, though Mark himself is not. As Mark grows up, he discovers that his uniqueness gives him individuality and the ability to live away from the community, something which the clones are now unable to do. The leaders of the community realize that the latest generations of clones are losing all sense of creativity and are unable to come up with new solutions to problems; simultaneously they see that the growing lack of high-technology equipment will result in the community losing the ability to continue with the cloning process. Mark, now a teenager, also sees this problem, and rather than lead an expedition to find more high-technology equipment instead at the climax of the book leads a group of people that he has persuaded to his cause to leave the community and start over with a lower, more sustainable level of technology. In the ending to the book, he returns to the community 20 years later to discover that in the wake of a disaster the non-creative clones were unable to adapt, and the village has been destroyed. He then returns to his community, where all of the children and younger generations have been produced naturally and continue to thrive. The novel makes a passing reference to global warming caused by human pollution, an idea still in its infancy at the time of publication: The winters were getting colder, starting earlier, lasting longer, with more snows than he could remember from childhood. As soon as man stopped adding his megatons of filth to the atmosphere each day, he thought, the atmosphere had reverted to what it must have been long ago, moister weather summer and winter, more stars than he had ever seen before, and more, it seemed, each night than the night before: the sky a clear, endless blue by day, velvet blue-black at night with blazing stars that modern man had never seen. fr:Hier, les oiseaux pl:Gdzie dawniej śpiewał ptak ro:Unde, cândva, suave păsări cântătoare...

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

The story begins with the death of Napoleon, the original antagonist of Animal Farm. The animals of the farm, fearing what will become of them, learn that Snowball is alive and well, and Snowball returns to the farm to encourage capitalism. A second windmill is soon built alongside the first, and the two are thenceforth known as the Twin Mills (allegorical of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center), and the animals all learn to walk on their hind legs, something hitherto forbidden by Old Major shortly before the expulsion of Mr. Jones from the farm. Also, in place of the original Seven Commandments, Snowball adopts a single slogan for the animals to live by: All animals are born equal - what they become is their own affair. As time passes, the animals, under the leadership of Snowball, realise the properties of monetary gain, and begin to file lawsuits against neighbouring farms, allowing Animal Farm to gain land and wealth. The revitalised farm also attracts animals from elsewhere in England, who are segregated from the farm animals (a possible allegory for American racial segregation). In an effort to increase their wealth, Snowball proposes to transform the farm into a large fairground named Animal Fair (similar to the development of Coney Island in the 19th Century), and in order to provide power for the fair, the animals drive off a group of beavers and other woodland creatures living by a nearby river, and the beaver-dams are destroyed in order for the farm to exploit the water-supply of the river. Despite the success of Animal Fair, the excessive littering and pollution leaves the farm in a deplorable state, and matters worsen when the Twin Mills are destroyed by the woodland creatures in retaliation for their expulsion from the riverbank (in a manner similar to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center). Snowball counteracts this by declaring war on the now-fanatical woodland creatures, even though Animal Farm is in no position to win the war.

Snowball''s Chance

In the beginning of the story Jonah and his friend Chip Winston, who also learns that he is adopted, receive letters from an unknown person. The letters say “You are one of the missing” and “Beware! They are coming to get you”. At first they take it as some kind of joke but soon to wonder more and more about who are their birth parents and why they got these letters. They decide that the best way to figure out is to go into Chip’s parent''s safe. There they find a phone number to an FBI agent named James Reardon. Soon Jonah asks his parents if they can call the adoption agency and ask who his birth parents really are. They only tell his dad to contact the FBI to talk to James Reardon. Jonah, his parents, and his sister Katherine meet James Reardon. Right before the meet, a janitor gives Jonah a bottle of Mountain Dew. When they finally meet with James Reardon, he tells them Jonah was illegally adopted from a foreign country and might be deported. He refuses to tell them the country''s name, though. When Jonah goes to the bathroom to throw up thanks to the Mountain Dew, another, younger janitor appears out of nowhere in the bathroom and tells him a file would appear on the desk by the time he got back. He tells Jonah to memorize as many names as possible. Back in the room, he distracts the adults while Katherine takes pictures of the documents. It turns out to be the addresses and phone numbers of 36 teenagers, including Chip and Jonah. It also includes the names of several adults, including a woman named Angela DuPre. Chip and Katherine begin calling the numbers. The adults all hung up. Most of the kids turn out to live in the vicinity of Chip and Jonah. After a while they receive a letter from Angela DuPre, telling them to meet her at the library to talk about the things that are happening and get more information. At the library, Angela DuPre tells them that time travelers exist and that she had been researching. She tells them that she used to work at an airport, until an airplane, full of babies, appeared out of nowhere. After the babies were removed, the plane disappeared. She speculates that the babies on the plane were originally adults who were turned into babies by time traveling. Then a man breaks into the room and is promptly tackled by the "janitor" from the FBI who talked to Jonah in the bathroom. Chip, Jonah, and Katherine escape through a window, but Angela stays behind for more information. Later, when they''re leaving the library, they see Angela, who disappears into thin air. When they get home, they find out the lists of names was deleted from Chip''s computer. Shortly afterwards, Jonah''s mom receives a flyer in the mail advertising an adoption conference for teen adoptees and their parents. Jonah persuades his parents to let him bring Katherine along, too. At the conference, all the adoptees are divided into two groups, with Jonah, Chip, and all the kids on the list in one group, and everyone else in another. Katherine pretends to be a girl named Daniella McCarthy to get into Jonah''s group. The kids are led to a cave in the woods by two men name Gary and Mr. Hodge. Then the cave is transported to a place called a time hollow. The "janitor" from the FBI, whom Jonah, Chip, and Katherine have nicknamed JB, appears and attacks Gary and Mr. Hodge. Soon Angela arrives too. They find out that Gary and Hodge work for an organization called Interchronological Rescue, an organization dedicated to rescuing children from history, such as toddlers trapped in burning houses and people left for dead during the Bubonic Plague; taking them to the distant future; turning them into babies; and putting them up for adoption. The organization got greedy, however, and they started taking famous babies whose disappearances were noticed. Finally, when they were flying to the future with a load of babies, JB chased after the plane and caused it to crash in the twenty-first century. Gary and Hodge want to turn all the kids into babies and take them to the future, and JB wants to send them all back to die. Finally, JB sends Chip and another boy named Alex back to the fifteenth century , but Jonah and Katherine grab Chip''s arms right before he disappears and find themselves falling backwards through time. On the way, Jonah manages to convince JB to let him and Katherine help Chip and Alex repair time so everyone can go home to the twenty-first century.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Accident

By Danielle Steel

The Riddle of the Sands

By Robert Erskine Childers

Lady of Quality

By Georgette Heyer

Frankensteins of Fraud

No Author Listed

Camelot 30K

By Robert Forward

The Ringworld Throne

By Larry Niven

Firefox Down

By Craig Thomas

Egri csillagok

No Author Listed

Velocity

By Dean Koontz

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

By Kate Wilhelm

Snowball's Chance

By John Reed

Found

By Margaret Haddix