Epic ambitious & entertaining Stranger in a Strange Land" caused controversy & uproar when it was first published. Still topical & challenging today the story of Valentine Michael Smith the first man from Mars to visit Earth is in the great tradition of stories that endure through the power of the author's imagination that stretches from Gulliver's Travels to 1984." ...

Like the rest of the nation the Burracombe villagers are shocked when King George the Sixth dies suddenly in 1952. But in the midst of their grief the arrival of a stranger in the village on the very same day goes almost unnoticed as the villagers have their own concerns... Farmers daughter Val needs to find a home before she can marry her sweetheart; Hilary is struggling to come to terms with her new responsibilities & Stella is still getting to know the sister she thought she had lost during the war. While the children at the village school are as lively & inquisitive as ever there are still conflicts & feuds amongst the long-standing residents of Burracombe. Then a search for a family draws the whole village together & more than one person is led to question their own ideas about families & what they mean. ...

Jesse Stone is an ex LA cop who has taken the job of police chief in Paradise Massachusetts. His drinking & his damaged relationship with his wife define him as much as his supreme skill at policing his patch. When Crow an Apache hitman turns up in Jesse Stones office he is intrigued & very much on his guard. Ten years before Crow was part of a gang that had taken a woman in the town hostage when a bank raid went wrong. The hostages were released unharmed thanks to Crows moral view that you didnt kill women but he also got away with enough money not to have to work again. So why is Crow back in town? Why has he come to see Jesse? & why has he taken a job of kidnapping a young girl & her mother? All questions to which Jesse has to find answers as things start to go badly wrong in Paradise. ...

One cold March morning a young woman lay dying of multiple stab wounds on her own driveway. She came through the nightmare that followed laughing. This book describes what happened in detail. Julie Chimes tells of her out-of-body experiences during the crisis as well as the dreams & premonitions leading up to it. She recounts the frenzied attack by a paranoid schizophrenic. She describes what it feels like to die & then unforseeably to live to tell the tale. ...

An evangelistic preacher in paint & self-proclaimed man of visions Reverend Howard Finster became one of the most widely known & prolific self-taught artists producing over 46 000 pieces of art by his death in 2001. Finster often referred to himself as a stranger from another world & Gods last red light on the planet earth. He saw himself as a sacred artist fulfilling his visionary prophesies revealed to him by God through a heavenly outer space world. Thus Finster believed he was to disperse warnings to people to save their souls from the horrors of hell. These experiences were very real to Finster & provided a seemingly limitless variety of images for his art & content for his rapid fire stream-of-consciousness monologues. This book provides an in-depth survey of Finsters career illustrating the variety of themes inherent in his work much of it relating to his visionary experiences including: Visions of Other Worlds Sermons in Paint Historical & Cultural Heroes & The Plant Farm Museum [ Paradise Garden]. Glen C. Davies is an artist muralist lecturer & curator. Other contributors are Phyllis Kind Jim Arient & N. J. Girardot. ...

Magic is not simply a matter of the occult arts but a whole way of thinking of dreaming the impossible. The supreme fiction of magical thinking is the Arabian Nights" with its flying carpets hidden treasure & sudden revelations. As part of her exploration into the prophetic enchantments of the Nights Marina Warner retells some of the most wonderful & lesser-known stories. She explores the figure of the dark magician or magus from Solomon to the wicked uncle in " Aladdin"; the complex vitality of the genies or jinn; & animal metamorphoses. With startling originality & impeccable research this groundbreaking book shows how magic in the deepest sense helped to create the modern world & how profoundly it is still inscribed in the way we think today." ...

He meets women. He gains their trust. He kills them. That's all Maeve Kerrigan knows about the man she is hunting. Three women have been strangled in their homes by the same sadistic killer. With no sign of a break-in every indication shows that they let in their attacker. But the evidence is pointing at a shocking suspect: DCI Josh Derwent Maeve's colleague. Maeve refuses to believe he could be involved but how well does she really know her partner? After all this is hardly the first time Derwent's been accused of murder... ...

DARE TO BREAK THE RULES When Morwenna Morgan defies her brothers orders & rescues a shipwreck victim from a Cornish beach she doesnt expect an instant attraction to the injured stranger. This is the kind of man Morwenna can imagine falling for
- not the unpleasant suitor her brothers forcing on her! Except the stranger is Lord Rupert Melford
- a government agent sent to entrap the Morgan family! He has to believe that Morwenna is part of a smuggling plot but her sweet nature & devotion to nursing him speak only of her innocence...

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In the late summer of 1913 George Sawle brings the charming aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance to his family's modest home. The shared intimacies of this weekend link the Sawle & Valance families irrevocably becoming legendary events in a larger story told & interpreted in different ways over the coming century. Throughout this richly comic history of sexual mores & literary reputation we follow the two families in a series of widely spaced episodes through startling changes in fortune & circumstance. An impeccably nuanced exploration of changing taste class & social etiquette The Strange's Child written in deliciously witty & observant prose is an enthralling novel from one of the finest writers in the English language. ' With The Stranger's Child an already remarkable talent unfurls into something spectacular' Sunday Times 'A remarkable unmissable achievement.. . One leaves the novel with a sense of the truly extraordinary' Independent ' Elegant seductive & extremely enjoyable to read.. . The Stranger's Child will no doubt be one of the best novels published this year' Guardian ...

Once she had got over the initial shock of the young man's nudity Claudia allowed herself to breathe properly again... When Claudia finds a sexy stranger near her home she discovers that he has lost his memory along with his clothes. Having turned her back on relationships since the death of her husband Claudia finds herself scandalising her friends by inviting the stranger into her home & into her bed... From the Sunday Times bestselling author of In Too Deep ...