Format: 280 pages, Paperback Published: May 28, 2023 by Book Guild ISBN: 9781915603869 (ISBN10: 1915603862)
Blurb
London, September 1888. Jack the Ripper roams the streets. A scream rings out from beneath the stage of the Lyceum Theatre…
A young ‘actress’ has been attacked, suffering peculiar bite wounds to her neck; an event that announces a series of strange, vampiric happenings, and thrusts an unwitting Bram Stoker – acting manager of the Lyceum and aspiring author – into the limelight, and the action.
Increasingly perplexed by the unsettling behaviour of his ‘Guv’nor’, the brilliant but mercurial actor, Henry Irving, and Irving’s acclaimed leading lady, Ellen Terry, Stoker soon starts suspecting the worst. And then, another attack reveals a vicious Prussian baron, returned to London as a vampire seeking revenge…
Alive with Gothic intrigue, reversal and surprise, Mr Stoker will keep the reader enthralled and confounded until its final, shocking scene – indeed, until its very last word.
‘This is a fully realised Gothic world, a stimulating mix of homely familiarity and lurking menace which will engage readers of all ages.’ David Punter, author of The Literature of Terror
EDINBURGH, 1853. In a city of science, discovery can be deadly . . .
In a time of unprecedented scientific discovery, the public’s appetite for wonder has seen a resurgence of interest in mesmerism, spiritualism and other unexplained phenomena.#
Dr Will Raven is wary of the shadowlands that lie between progress and quackery, but Sarah Fisher can’t afford to be so picky. Frustrated in her medical ambitions, she sees opportunity in a new therapeutic field not already closed off to women.
Raven has enough on his hands as it is. Body parts have been found at Surgeons’ Hall, and they’re not anatomy specimens. In a city still haunted by the crimes of Burke and Hare, he is tasked with heading off a scandal. When further human remains are found, Raven is able to identify a prime suspect, and the hunt is on before he kills again.
Unfortunately, the individual he seeks happens to be an accomplished actor, a man of a thousand faces and a renowned master of disguise.
With the lines between science and spectacle dangerously blurred, the stage is set for a grand and deadly illusion . . .
Format: Paperback Expected publication: June 1, 2023 by Puffin ISBN: 9780241450833 (ISBN10: 0241450837)
Lia is off on an adventure, and she’d like a pet to take with her. In another corner of the meadow is Lion – who is also looking for an adventure, and for a pet of his own . . . What will happen when they meet?
A story from a stunning new author-illustrator about a special friendship, the nature of play, conflict and compromise, and about how much richer life is when you work out how to share it.
Format: 232 pages, Hardcover Published: May 19, 2020 by Pen and Sword History ISBN: 9781526748072 (ISBN10: 152674807X)
Blurb
The meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party cowed the masses into a sense of false utopia. During Hitler’s 1932 election campaign over half those who voted for Hitler were women. Germany’s women had witnessed the anarchy of the post-First World War years, and the chaos brought about by the rival political gangs brawling on their streets. When Hitler came to power there was at last a ray of hope that this man of the people would restore not only political stability to Germany but prosperity to its people.
As reforms were set in place, Hitler encouraged women to step aside from their jobs and allow men to take their place. As the guardian of the home, the women of Hitler’s Germany were pinned as the very foundation for a future thousand-year Reich. Not every female in Nazi Germany readily embraced the principle of living in a society where two distinct worlds existed, however with the outbreak of the Second World War, Germany’s women would soon find themselves on the frontline.
Ultimately Hitler’s housewives experienced mixed fortunes throughout the years of the Second World War. Those whose loved ones went off to war never to return; those who lost children not only to the influences of the Hitler Youth but the Allied bombing; those who sought comfort in the arms of other young men and those who would serve above and beyond of exemplary on the German home front. Their stories form intimate and intricately woven tales of life, love, joy, fear and death. Hitler’s Housewives: German Women on the Home Front is not only an essential document towards better understanding one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies where the women became an inextricable link, but also the role played by Germany’s women on the home front which ultimately became blurred within the horrors of total war.
This is their story, in their own words, told for the first time.
Format: 368 pages, Paperback Published: January 1, 2023 by Orbit ISBN: 9780356520865 (ISBN10: 0356520862) Language: English
Blurb
The Terraformers is an equally heart-warming and thought-provoking vision of the future for fans of Becky Chambers, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Martha Wells.
Destry is a top network analyst with the Environmental Rescue Team, an ancient organization devoted to preventing ecosystem collapse. On the planet Sask-E, her mission is to terraform an Earthlike world, with the help of her taciturn moose, Whistle. But then she discovers a city that isn’t supposed to exist, hidden inside a massive volcano. Torn between loyalty to the ERT and the truth of the planet’s history, Destry makes a decision that echoes down the generations.
Centuries later, Destry’s protege, Misha, is building a planetwide transit system when his worldview is turned upside-down by Sulfur, a brilliant engineer from the volcano city. Together, they uncover a dark secret about the real estate company that’s buying up huge swaths of the planet―a secret that could destroy the lives of everyone who isn’t Homo sapiens. Working with a team of robots, naked mole rats, and a very angry cyborg cow, they quietly sow seeds of subversion. But when they’re threatened with violent diaspora, Misha and Sulfur’s very unusual child faces a stark choice: deploy a planet-altering weapon, or watch their people lose everything they’ve built on Sask-E.
My Review
This is two stories that follow on from each other, taking place several thousand years apart, containing some of the same characters. The characters are a variety of species and genders.
The character pairs of Destry and Moose, Sulfur and Misha, Moose and Scrubjay, are memorable and loving in their own way. They are biological or mechanical, hominins or other species, all with sentience. They interact with each other, form families and are torn between doing the right thing and being controlled by Verdance or Emerald. Scrubjay and Moose are particularly interesting. Scrubjay is a sentient flying train, Moose is a sentient cat. They fall in love with each other while taking on and taking down Emerald, the corporation that has taken control of Sask-E and who are trying to destroy Spider City.
The main theme of the story is that companies controlling life is a bad idea. That better ways of governing and building communities are possible, but there will always be forces intent on breaking those better ways for their own profit.
I enjoyed the descriptions of the environments of Sask-E and the social structures. They are clearly thought out and based on a lot of research.
Newitz is a clear and amusing writer. I have read (listened to) their non-fiction book, Four Lost Cities, and to be fair I also follow Annalee Newitz on Instagram. I listen to their Our Opinions Are Correct podcast. It’s a sci-fi and fantasy podcast Annalee Newitz does with Charlie Jane Anders.
172 pages, Paperback First published January 1, 2014 This edition Format: 172 pages, Paperback Published: June 30, 2020 by Routledge ISBN: 9780367600778 (ISBN10: 0367600773) Language: English
Blurb
Cultural anxieties about fatness and the attendant stigmatisation of fat bodies, have lent a medical authority and cultural legitimacy to what can be described as ‘fat-phobia’. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation, pathologisation, and commodification of fatness, coupled with the moral panic over an alleged ‘obesity epidemic’, this volume brings together the latest scholarship from various critical disciplines to challenge existing ideas of fat and fat embodiment.
Shedding light on the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts, Queering Fat Embodiment destabilises established ideas about fat bodies, making explicit the intersectionality of fat identities and thereby countering the assertion that fat studies has in recent years reproduced a white, ableist, heteronormative subjectivity in its analyses.
A critical queer examination on fatness, Queering Fat Embodiment will be of interest to scholars of cultural and queer theory, sociology and media studies, working on questions of embodiment, stigmatisation and gender and sexuality.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 