AEM Library - Genres

Vampire Chronicles 3: The Queen of the Damned

SUMMARY: "A welcome chance to catch up with old friends...Fascinating...When we emerge from its folds, there's good news on the last page: 'The chronicle of the vampires will continue.' Yum."PHILADELPHIA INQUIRERA feat of mesmerizing storytelling, a chilling entertainment, THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED unleashes Akasha, the Queen herself, who has risen from a six-thousand year sleep to let loose the powers of the night. Akasha has a marvelously devious plan to "save" mankind and destroy Lestat--in this extraordinarily sensual novel of the complex, erotic, electrifying world of the undead. SUMMARY: "A welcome chance to catch up with old friends...Fascinating...When we emerge from its folds, there's good news on the last page: 'The chronicle of the vampires will continue.' Yum."PHILADELPHIA INQUIRERA feat of mesmerizing storytelling, a chilling entertainment, THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED unleashes Akasha, the Queen herself, who has risen from a six-thousand year sleep to let loose the powers of the night. Akasha has a marvelously devious plan to "save" mankind and destroy Lestat--in this extraordinarily sensual novel of the complex, erotic, electrifying world of the undead.

Vampire Chronicles 10: Blood Canticle

Anne Rice

SUMMARY: Anne Rice continues her astonishing Vampire Chronicles in a new novel that begins whereBlackwood Farmleft off and tells the story of Lestat's quest for redemption, goodness, and the love of Rowan Mayfair. Welcome back to Blackwood Farm. Here are all of the brilliantly conceived characters that make up the two worlds of vampires and witches: Mona Mayfair, who's come to the farm to die and is brought into the realm of the undead; her uncle, Julian Mayfair, guardian of the family, determined to forever torment Lestat for what he has done to Mona; Rowan Mayfair, brilliant neurosurgeon and witch, who finds herself dangerously drawn to the all-powerful Lestat; her husband, Michael Curry, hero of the Mayfair Chronicles, who seeks Lestat's help with the temporary madness of his wife; Ash Templeton, a 5,000-year-old Taltos who has taken Mona's child; and Patsy, the country-western singer, who returns to avenge her death at the hands of her son, Quinn Blackwood. Delightfully, at the book's centre is the Vampire Lestat, once the epitome of evil, now pursuing the transformation set in motion withMemnoch the Devil. He struggles with his vampirism and yearns for goodness, purity and love, as he saves Patsy's ghost from the dark realm of the Earthbound, uncovers the mystery of the Taltos and unselfishly decides the fate of his beloved Rowan Mayfair. A story of love and loyalty, of the search for passion and promise,Blood Canticleis Anne Rice at her finest.

Vampire Chronicles 6: The Vampire Armand

Anne Rice

SUMMARY: In the latest installment of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice summons up dazzling worlds to bring us the story of Armand--eternally young, with the face of a Botticelli angel. Armand, who first appeared in all his dark glory more than twenty years ago in the now-classicInterview with the Vampire, the first of The Vampire Chronicles, the novel that established its author worldwide as a magnificent storyteller and creator of magical realms. Now, we go with Armand across the centuries to the Kiev Rus of his boyhood--a ruined city under Mongol dominion--and to ancient Constantinople, where Tartar raiders sell him into slavery. And in a magnificent palazzo in the Venice of the Renaissance we see him emotionally and intellectually in thrall to the great vampire Marius, who masquerades among humankind as a mysterious, reclusive painter and who will bestow upon Armand the gift of vampiric blood. As the novel races to its climax, moving through scenes of luxury and elegance, of ambush, fire, and devil worship to nineteenth-century Paris and today's New Orleans, we see its eternally vulnerable and romantic hero forced to choose between his twilight immortality and the salvation of his immortal soul.

Vampire Chronicles 7: Merrick

Anne Rice

EDITORIAL REVIEW: At the center is the beautiful, unconquerable witch, Merrick. She is a descendant of the gens de colors libres, a cast derived from the black mistresses of white men, a society of New Orleans octaroons and quadroons, steeped in the lore and ceremony of voodoo, who reign in the shadowy world where the African and the French--the white and the dark--intermingle. Her ancestors are the Great Mayfair Witches, of whom she knows nothing--and from whom she inherits the power and magical knowledge of a Circe.Into this exotic New Orleans realm comes David Talbot, hero, storyteller, adventurer, almost mortal vampire, visitor from another dark realm. It is he who recounts Merrick's haunting tale--a tale that takes us from the New Orleans of the past and present to the jungles of Guatemala, from the Mayan ruins of a century ago to ancient civilizations not yet explored.Anne Rice's richly told novel weaves an irresistible story of two worlds: the witches' world and the vampires' world, where magical powers and otherworldly fascinations are locked together in a dance of seduction, death, and rebirth.

Vampire Chronicles 8: Blood and Gold

Anne Rice

SUMMARY: In the best Anne Rice tradition, the great Vampire Marius returns to tell us the mesmerizing story of his life through the ages, from the time of Caesar Augustus to the present. The Vampire Marius, child of the Millenea, has lived two thousand years. He tells his story to Thorne, a lone vampire who was a Viking in a mortal life tells of his birth into the Senatorial Class at the time of Caesar Augustus, and how he was transformed into a "dark god" by Druids in the forests of Gaul; how he created the Vampire Armand and became guardian of Akasha and Enkil, the Queen and the King of Vampires, who hold within themselves the secret core of the life of the undead "destroy them and you destroy all vampires." He relates how he became the voice of reason among the vampires, and how he created Pandora, the vampire he still grieves for... We see Marius as a mortal boy in the teeming streets of second-century Rome, and in young manhood in the time of Constantine and his battle to save Rome from the Visigoths. We follow him through the Dark Ages and the Black Death, and through another thousand years to Venice and to Florence, where he seeks out the great Botticelli and becomes a painter, working in a glorious palazzo a blood drinker in the thick of a rich and brilliant mortal life. Worlds within worlds unfold historic, fantastic, cultural, vampiric, from the London of Henry VIII to 17th-century Paris and Weimar as the novel moves to its splendid finale in an Aegean kingdom ruled by the great vampire: the magician Marius.

Vampire Chronicles 9: Blackwood Farm

Anne Rice

SUMMARY: In her new novel, perennial bestseller Anne Rice fuses her two uniquely seductive strains of narrative -- her Vampire legend and her lore of the Mayfair witches -- to give us a world of classic deep-south luxury and ancestral secrets. Welcome to Blackwood Farm: soaring white columns, spacious drawing rooms, bright, sun-drenched gardens, and a dark strip of the dense Sugar Devil Swamp. This is the world of Quinn Blackwood, a brilliant young man haunted since birth by a mysterious doppelgänger, “Goblin,” a spirit from a dream world that Quinn can’t escape and that prevents him from belonging anywhere. When Quinn is made a Vampire, losing all that is rightfully his and gaining an unwanted immortality, his doppelgänger becomes even more vampiric and terrifying than Quinn himself. As the novel moves backwards and forwards in time, from Quinn’s boyhood on Blackwood Farm to present day New Orleans, from ancient Athens to 19th-century Naples, Quinn seeks out the legendary Vampire Lestat in the hope of freeing himself from the spectre that draws him inexorably back to Sugar Devil Swamp and the explosive secrets it holds. A story of youth and promise, of loss and the search for love, of secrets and destiny, Blackwood Farm is Anne Rice at her mesmerizing best. From the Hardcover edition.

Shall We Tell the President?

Jeffrey Archer

From School Library Journal

Starred Review. The FBI has six days to stop a plot to assassinate the President in this title originally published in 1977 as a stand-alone thriller and refashioned in 1987 to complete No. 1 New York Times best-selling author Archer's "Kane and Abel" trilogy. The narration is by Audie Award winner Lorelei King (_Tallgrass_), who also read the last entry in this series, The Prodigal Daughter (Jeff Harding read the first; abridged recordings of all three are available from Macmillan Audio). King performs expressively, adding just the right amount of excitement to the story. The abridgment is skillfully executed; it is impossible to tell where material has been omitted. Highly recommended.—Ilka Gordon, Siegel Coll. of Judaic Studies Lib., Cleveland
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Outrageous top-notch terror.” —_Vogue_

“Holds the reader in a vicelike grip.”—_Penthouse_

“The countdown is the thing; the pace, the pursuit, the what-next…”—_Boston__ Globe_

“The only difference between this book and The Day of the Jackal is that Archer is a better writer.”—_Chicago__ Tribune_

Only Time Will Tell (2011)

Jeffrey Archer

The "Clifton Chronicles" is Jeffrey Archer's most ambitious work in four decades as an international bestselling author. The epic tale of Harry Clifton's life begins in 1920, with the chilling words, 'I was told that my father was killed in the war'. But it will be another twenty years before Harry discovers how his father really died, which will only lead him to question: who was his father? Is he the son of Arthur Clifton, a stevedore who worked in Bristol docks, or the first born son of a scion of West Country society, whose family owns a shipping line? "Only Time Will Tell" covers the years from 1920 to 1940, and includes a cast of memorable characters that "The Times" has compared to "The Forsyte Saga". Volume one takes us from the ravages of the Great War to the outbreak of the Second World War, when Harry must decide whether to take up a place at Oxford, or join the navy and go to war with Hitler's Germany. In Jeffrey Archer's masterful hands, the reader is taken on a journey that they won't want to end, and when you turn the last page of this unforgettable yarn, you will be faced with a dilemma that neither you, nor Harry Clifton could have anticipated.

The Sins of the Father

Jeffrey Archer

On the heels of the international bestseller Only Time Will Tell, Jeffrey Archer picks up the sweeping story of the Clifton Chronicles….

Only days before Britain declares war on Germany, Harry Clifton, hoping to escape the consequences of long-buried family secrets, and forced to accept that his desire to marry Emma Barrington will never be fulfilled, has joined the Merchant Navy. But his ship is sunk in the Atlantic by a German U-boat, drowning almost the entire crew. An American cruise liner, the SS Kansas Star, rescues a handful of sailors, among them Harry and the third officer, an American named Tom Bradshaw. When Bradshaw dies in the night, Harry seizes on the chance to escape his tangled past and assumes his identity.

But on landing in America, he quickly learns the mistake he has made, when he discovers what is awaiting Bradshaw in New York. Without any way of proving his true identity, Harry Clifton is now chained to a past that could be far worse than the one he had hoped to escape.

Review

Praise for *Only Time Will Tell

“Archer delivers another page-turning, heart-stopping saga, with delightful twists and a surprise ending… readers will surely wait for the next with bated breath.”
—Publishers Weekly

“What appears at the outset to be a straightforward coming-of-age tale becomes, by the end, a saga of power, betrayal, and bitter hatred… An outstanding effort from a reliable veteran.”
—Booklist* (starred review)

“I was utterly hooked. It was an absurdly enjoyable read.”
—Daily Telegraph (London)

More Praise for Jeffrey Archer
“Archer can make you wring your hands in anguish and guffaw out loud, all on the same page, and he does in these fifteen ingenious stories.”
—Star-Ledger (New Jersey) on *And Thereby Hangs a Tale

“A compelling read…The pace never flags.”
—Newsday (New York) on A Prisoner of Birth

“One of the top-ten storytellers in the world.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Archer is a master entertainer.”
—Time*

From the Back Cover

A sweeping multi-generational saga of fate, fortune, and redemption, the Clifton Chronicles continue in the latest epic masterwork from international bestselling author

JEFFREY ARCHER

It is only days before Britain declares war on Germany. Harry Clifton, hoping to escape the consequences of a familyscandal, and realizinghe can never marry Emma Barrington, has joined the Merchant Navy. Whena German U-boat sinks his ship, Harry and a handful of sailors are rescued by the SS Kansas Star, among them an American named Tom Bradshaw. That night, when Bradshaw dies, Harry seizes a chance to bury his past—by assumingthe man’s identity.

“[A] PAGE-TURNING, HEART-STOPPING SAGA.”*—Publishers Weekly*

When Harry lands in America, he is arrested for the murder of Tom Bradshaw’s brother.Alone, accused,and unable to prove his true identity, Harry is now chained to a past that could be worse thanwhat he left behind—butdestined for a futurethat would be greater than he ever dreamed…

“UNFORGETTABLE.”—Library Journal (starred review)

on the Clifton Chronicles’ *Only Time Will Tell*

Towers of Midnight

Brandon Sanderson | Robert Jordan

Review

“The battle scenes have the breathless urgency of firsthand experience, and the . . . evil laced into the forces of good, the dangers latent in any promised salvation, the sense of the unavoidable onslaught of unpredictable events bear the marks of American national experience during the last three decades, just as the experience of the First World War and its aftermath gave its imprint to J. R. R. Tolkien’s work.”--_The New York Times_ on The Wheel of Time®

Product Description

The Last Battle has started. The seals on the Dark One’s prison are crumbling. The Pattern itself is unraveling, and the armies of the Shadow have begun to boil out of the Blight.

The sun has begun to set upon the Third Age.

Perrin Aybara is now hunted by specters from his past: Whitecloaks, a slayer of wolves, and the responsibilities of leadership. All the while, an unseen foe is slowly pulling a noose tight around his neck. To prevail, he must seek answers in Tel’aran’rhiod and find a way--at long last--to master the wolf within him or lose himself to it forever.

Meanwhile, Matrim Cauthon prepares for the most difficult challenge of his life. The creatures beyond the stone gateways--the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn--have confused him, taunted him, and left him hanged, his memory stuffed with bits and pieces of other men’s lives. He had hoped that his last confrontation with them would be the end of it, but the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. The time is coming when he will again have to dance with the Snakes and the Foxes, playing a game that cannot be won. The Tower of Ghenjei awaits, and its secrets will reveal the fate of a friend long lost.

This penultimate novel of Robert Jordan’s #1 New York Times bestselling series--the second of three based on materials he left behind when he died in 2007--brings dramatic and compelling developments to many threads in the Pattern. The end draws near.

Dovie’andi se tovya sagain. It’s time to toss the dice.

After America

John Birmingham

From Publishers Weekly

In this sequel to Without Warning, Birmingham delivers a stirring account of the events after "the Disappearance," tracking a group of survivors in New York, Seattle, Texas, Kansas City, Berlin, Salisbury, and London. Shortly before the Iraq War, a wave of unknown energy passes over most of North America, scouring humanity and triggering chaos. Now the wave is gone, and the survivors face the challenges of rebuilding their empty continents. In the Texas Administrative Division, an ex-general wages a war of ethnic cleansing against the new immigrants coming in search of opportunity; in New York, hoards of scavengers pick through the ruins of the city. Meanwhile, over a billion Muslims are left homeless after Israeli nukes make the Middle East uninhabitable, and they need somewhere to live. As American forces attempt to retake the East Coast, an inexperienced president finds his leadership tested. Though his dialogue often feels functional or formulaic, Birmingham's inspired speculation is ingenious and engrossing. Along with colorful if not entirely sympathetic characters and a wicked sense of the absurd, this should make excellent pool-side reading.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Now, three years later, a skeleton U.S. government headquartered in Seattle directs the reconstruction of an entire nation—and the battle for New York City has begun.

Pirates and foreign militias are swarming the East Coast, taking everything they can. The president comes to the Declared Security Zone of New York and barely survives the visit. The enemy—whoever they are—controls Manhattan’s concrete canyons and the abandoned flatlands of Long Island. The U.S. military, struggling with sketchy communications and a lack of supplies, is mired in a nightmare of urban combat.

Caught up in the violence is a Polish-born sergeant who watches the carnage through the eyes of an intellectual and with the heart of a warrior. Two smugglers, the highborn Lady Julianne Balwyn and her brawny partner Rhino, search for a treasure whose key lies inside an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment. Thousands of miles away, a rogue general leads the secession of Texas and a brutal campaign against immigrants, while Miguel Pieraro, a Mexican-born rancher, fights back. And in England, a U.S. special ops agent is called into a violent shadow war against an enemy that has come after her and her family.

The president is a stranger to the military mindset, but now this mild-mannered city engineer from the Pacific Northwest needs to make a soldier’s choice. With New York clutched in the grip of thousands of heavily armed predators, is an all-out attack on the city the only way to save it?

From the geopolitics of post-American dominance to the fallout of Israel’s nuclear strike, After America provides a gripping, intelligent, and harrowing chronicle of a world in the maw of chaos—and lives lived in the dangerous dawn of a strange new future.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Mohsin Hamid

Amazon.com Review

Mohsin Hamid's first novel, Moth Smoke, dealt with the confluence of personal and political themes, and his second, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, revisits that territory in the person of Changez, a young Pakistani. Told in a single monologue, the narrative never flags. Changez is by turns naive, sinister, unctuous, mildly threatening, overbearing, insulting, angry, resentful, and sad. He tells his story to a nameless, mysterious American who sits across from him at a Lahore cafe. Educated at Princeton, employed by a first-rate valuation firm, Changez was living the American dream, earning more money than he thought possible, caught up in the New York social scene and in love with a beautiful, wealthy, damaged girl. The romance is negligible; Erica is emotionally unavailable, endlessly grieving the death of her lifelong friend and boyfriend, Chris.

Changez is in Manila on 9/11 and sees the towers come down on TV. He tells the American, "...I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased... I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees..." When he returns to New York, there is a palpable change in attitudes toward him, starting right at immigration. His name and his face render him suspect.

Ongoing trouble between Pakistan and India urge Changez to return home for a visit, despite his parents' advice to stay where he is. While there, he realizes that he has changed in a way that shames him. "I was struck at first by how shabby our house appeared... I was saddened to find it in such a state... This was where I came from... and it smacked of lowliness." He exorcises that feeling and once again appreciates his home for its "unmistakable personality and idiosyncratic charm." While at home, he lets his beard grow. Advised to shave it, even by his mother, he refuses. It will be his line in the sand, his statement about who he is. His company sends him to Chile for another business valuation; his mind filled with the troubles in Pakistan and the U.S. involvement with India that keeps the pressure on. His work and the money he earns have been overtaken by resentment of the United States and all it stands for.

Hamid's prose is filled with insight, subtly delivered: "I felt my age: an almost childlike twenty-two, rather than that permanent middle-age that attaches itself to the man who lives alone and supports himself by wearing a suit in a city not of his birth." In telling of the janissaries, Christian boys captured by Ottomans and trained to be soldiers in the Muslim Army, his Chilean host tells him: "The janissaries were always taken in childhood. It would have been far more difficult to devote themselves to their adopted empire, you see, if they had memories they could not forget." Changez cannot forget, and Hamid makes the reader understand that--and all that follows. --Valerie Ryan

A Conversation with Mohsin Hamid
Set in modern-day Pakistan, Mohsin Hamid's debut novel, Moth Smoke, went on to win awards and was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His bold new novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is a daring, fast-paced monologue of a young Pakistani man telling his life story to a mysterious American stranger. It's a controversial look at the dark side of the American Dream, exploring the aftermath of 9/11, international unease, and the dangerous pull of nostalgia. Amazon.com senior editor Brad Thomas Parsons shared an e-mail exchange with Mohsin Hamid to talk about his powerful new book

Read the Amazon.com Interview with Mohsin Hamid

From Publishers Weekly

Hamid's second book (after Moth Smoke) is an intelligent and absorbing 9/11 novel, written from the perspective of Changez, a young Pakistani whose sympathies, despite his fervid immigrant embrace of America, lie with the attackers. The book unfolds as a monologue that Changez delivers to a mysterious American operative over dinner at a Lahore, Pakistan, cafe. Pre-9/11, Princeton graduate Changez is on top of the world: recruited by an elite New York financial company, the 22-year-old quickly earns accolades from his hard-charging supervisor, plunges into Manhattan's hip social whirl and becomes infatuated with Erica, a fellow Princeton graduate pining for her dead boyfriend. But after the towers fall, Changez is subject to intensified scrutiny and physical threats, and his co-workers become markedly less affable as his beard grows in ("a form of protest," he says). Erica is committed to a mental institution, and Changez, upset by his adopted country's "growing and self-righteous rage," slacks off at work and is fired. Despite his off-putting commentary, the damaged Changez comes off as honest and thoughtful, and his creator handles him with a sympathetic grace. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1452-1519

1861-1865

1886-1924

1939-1945

A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas

A post-ep for Unbearable. Sort of. Now AU. Originally posted in 2005.

Abortion

Abortion & Birth Control

Action & Adventure

Adolescence

Adult

Adventure

Adventure stories; American

Alien Contact

aliens

All Ages

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence

Alternative History

Amarantha (ACoTaR)

Ambition in men

American

American Science Fiction And Fantasy

Americans

Americans - Arctic regions

Amren (ACoTaR)

anne rice

Anti-Catholicism

Appreciation

Archer

Arctic regions

Arizona

Art museum curators

Art museum curators - Crimes against

Art thefts

Arthurian

Artificial Satellites

Asia

Azizex666

Azriel (ACoTaR)

BA

Balloonists

Bedtime & Dreams

Beron Vanserra

bethany

Biographical

Biographical fiction

Biography & Autobiography

blogger

Blood and Ash

blood drinker

blood vivicanti

Boarding School & Prep School

Body

books

Boston (Mass.)

Brigands and robbers

Bron (ACoTaR)

business

Business - Leadership

Businesswomen

Cassian (ACoTaR)

Children of immigrants

Children of immigrants - United States

Children: Young Adult (Gr. 7-9)

Childrens

Children's Books

Children's stories; English

Classics

Code and cipher stories; American

Colorado

Comics & Graphic Novels

Coming of Age

Computer industry

Computer security

Conduct of life

Conspiracies

Contemporary

Courts and courtiers

Cresseida (ACoTaR)

Cresseida/Morrigan (ACoTaR)