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Back under the thumb of the Terran Empire after leading their planetary sector in an almost successful war against Imperial rule, Commissioner Desai saw real trouble brewing this time. A strange, fanatical movement was spreading like wildfire: there were rumours of the return of the fabled Elder Race: the Firstling, leader-elect of the planet, was on the run and hiding from Imperialist retribution. And off-planet agents from the Ythrian Domain and Mersia, Terra’s ancient foe, were abroad in the land. Unless Commissioner Desai could damp the fuse of rebellion, the universe would begin its terrifying descent into the Long Night . . .

Tiger Mann, sleuth and expert in counter-espionage, is lunching with a friend when he notices a girl enter the restaurant. To his friend, the girl is Edith Caine, a UN translator. But Tiger knows her as Rondine Lund, an Austrian who was a Nazi spy during the war. He had been in love with her – had even saved her life. In return, she had shot him and left him for dead.

So it was to be a personal vendetta . . .

Thomas Blades has been released from his time as God-King in the alternative world he fought and ruled over. His descendants rule and fight but he cannot bear to return and meddle in their lives.

On June 1st 1963 Donald Bailey set out on a hiking tour. For twelve days it was mountain and lakes, rivers and fells, healthy exercise and the magic of a starlit campfire. On the thirteenth day they found a cave and decided to explore. A rock fall cut off the entrance and they searched desperately for another way out. Exhausted and battered, they finally scrambled through a small shaft into a strangely changed countryside which was familiar, yet not familiar.

From a cottager who fed them and tended their wounds they learnt that somehow they were back in the days of the Civil War. Roundheads and Cavaliers battled desperately across the country and they found themselves involved in the bitter struggle for power.

Unwittingly they gave information to a Roundhead spy, which resulted in the death of a Cavalier Commander. He returns from the dead in monstrous form, trying to exact a terrible vengeance on the bewildered pair who are desperately seeking to return to their own time.

Since the day her father’s fishing boat returned without him, Peri and her mother have mourned his loss. Her mother sinks into a deep depression and spends her days gazing out at the sea. Unable to control her anger and sadness any longer, Peri uses the small magic she knows to hex the sea. And suddenly into her drab life come the King’s sons-changelings with strange ties to the underwater kingdom-a young magician, and, finally, love.

The Earth’s population was more than eight billion. One day they were there, the next they were gone – all except the guests at a family birthday party, a small tribe of American Indians, and, of course, the robots. Technology disintegrated, the Indians went back to nature, and the rest developed new and extraordinary powers. As for the robots, some went to live with the remnants of humanity, others gathered in their own community and commenced work on the Project, work which was baffling in all its fantastic electronic complexity. Then one day a traveller returned from the stars – and the idyllic existence of the last of Earth’s humans was threatened.

Walled off from a world it no longer remembers, the city of Thryn decays in arrogant isolation. Its ancient scriptures tell of the god,Gomath, who will one day return to perfect his city. But his return has been long awaited.

In a bizarre coincidence of events, Lupio, a cynical and decadent young aristocrat, is unwillingly entangled in the prophecy. Appalled, he decides to break ancient law and flee the city. He joins up with Dubilier, a failed poet and dreamer, who is trying to escape from the death of inspiration and love. Together they travel through uncharted lands in search of the lost god. One of them wants to find him. The other certainly does not…

Life on the moon under anything less than optimal conditions had always been a nightmare, and as Joe Kenmore and his colleague, Moreau, drove back to the City On The Moon on that day the Earth shuttle was due to land, the nearby mountain supporting critical elements of the shuttle’s landing mechanisms crumbled causing an avalanche and resulting in chaos.

Optimal conditions were no where in sight that day and as Kenmore and Moreau’s investigations lead to their conclusion that explosions had been responsible for the avalanche. Now they realized that they were in a race against the clock to restore the landing beam before the shuttle had reached it’s point of no return prior to landing.

Kenmore had more than strictly humanitarian reasons for wanting to prevent a mishap aboard the shuttle that day, because on this particular mission, Arlene Gray was aboard. Kenmore had been anxiously awaiting her arrival, and now his love’s life might hang in the balance.

Brinton couldn’t believe the inscription when he read it in the cold white moonlight. He was looking at his own grave. He tried to read the date but the light wasn’t strong enough to be certain. He returned to the graveyard by daylight… but the grave had gone.
He left the town in horror, but the grave followed him. He was drawn to burial grounds like iron to a magnet. It was always the same. By Moonlight he saw the grave, but never the date. By day he saw nothing. One night he saw the month. Then they day; at last he saw the year. He knew he was due to die in one week. What could he do? Can a man forestall his fate? Can a mortal outwit the dark designs of destiny? Was it all in his mind? Perhaps Roger Brinton was mad? The asylum is warmer than the grave. The day before he was due to die he saw the grave again… The earth was newly turned… it was waiting for him!

‘No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford’ Elmore Leonard

By day, Richard Hudson, woman-chaser and used-car salesman, works his crooked car lot with much success. By night, he returns home to a family of misfits. One day, seized by a feeling of terror and revulsion, he realises he’s wasting his life in the meaningless pursuit of money. His only hope, he decides, is to pursue his dream of making a movie.

Richard completes his cherished project, but forces beyond his control swiftly reject and destroy it. As a result, enraged and humiliated, he goes on a bender of epic proportions, drinking his way through the underbelly of Los Angeles and exacting a monstrous revenge on all who have crossed him.

More than any other series, THE AVENGERS typified the Swinging Sixties – beginning in 1961 with Patrick Macnee starring with Ian Hendry in a grainy, realistic spy thriller, and ending in 1969 with Macnee and the glamorous Linda Thorson blasting off into space in a surreal episode appropriately entitled ‘Bizarre’. Meanwhile we had seen the memorable Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg in roles unusually progressive for British television.

THE NEW AVENGERS in the mid-seventies reflected changing times but retained the essence of the show – as Macnee returned to play alongside another strong, independent heroine in the form of Joanna Lumley’s Purdey. And then there was the film…

THE AVENGERS DOSSIER is a uniquely comprehensive yet humorous survey of all the show’s incarnations. As well as a remarkably detailed episode guide to both series – even covering the kinkiness factor and champagne count in both – this volume gives behind the scenes insights and revelations about every aspect of the programme. The film and its production are examined, and critical essays look at the history behind the cult.

Kaeti branches out, moves farther from her beloved London. In the process she makes a whole range of new, intriguing friends; and lands herself in some scrapes startling even by her standards. The shadows she sprays on the pavement of a Thames Valley town come alive to haunt her; later, the magic Tiger Sweater she acquires does more than haunt the subjects of her wrath. While for a time her latest experience of France also looks like being her last. In a Thames-side hotel she conjures Hell on request; on a deserted airfield, and in the Green Palace, Glasgow, Hell returns to haunt her. In the West Country, she meets an eighteenth century benefactress; or is she? Certainly the experience lands Kaeti in hospital; for a while it seems she’s about to cross the Bridge of Dreams herself. Finally she circles back to London’ but a London neither you nor she has never seen…

But it’s all in a day’s work for Kaeti, the Bow Bells actress who is in touch with things magical and eternal.

There is a landscape between reality and dreams, a strange and primitive country that exists upon the edge of our waking world. Michael Whitlock knows that country well. His best friend lives there…
It beings with a scatter of earth, thrown over the infant by unseen hands, a haunting attack that is repeated day after day, culminating with an explosive fall of mud that nearly kills the boy. And found in those tons of raw, wet earth: flints, chalk artefacts, and remains of a primitive shrine and the dismembered carcase of a hunting dog.
The Whitlocks’ house, in the Kentish Weald, stands near a chalk-pit, and it is here that their son, Michael creates his preculiar imaginary world, making his camp by the pile of grave-earth from that early attack. Unaware of what is happening to him, the boy touches and uses the strange force that now ebbs and flows in the pit, And when the haunting returns, this time it is more subtle, almost wonderful in its secutive nature. Torn between a fear of the supernatural and greed for the results of Michael’s power, his adoptive parents are helpless. It is left to Françoise Jeury, a psyhic investigator, to piece together the bizarre truth of th epit and the shrine and the oddly silent boy.

The secrets of Asorbes – and of the alien Pharaoh who ruled there!

All bowed their heads before the golden splendour of Khasathut’s pyramid – and before his atrocities. Slaves and princes alike feared his awesome powers, which came from far beyond the stars. Only Khai was not blinded by the glories of the Pharaoh, for not only had he seen the horrible secrets of the pyramid but he had lived to escape their deadly grasp!

A man of two worlds, out of two ages, Khai fought to win the hand of the Queen Ashtarta and to vanquish the devil-king and his wraiths of hell. And he kept to an eternal faith: that one day the Golden Ones would return from their journey through the heavens bringing justice…

After two hundred years colonising earth, the Aleutians prepare to return to space, leaving behind humanity and an earth that have been shaped by their presence, their care, and their cruelty.

In the dying days of Aleutian rule, Catherine has altered her body to appear more alien, and soaks herself in the decadence of their culture. Misha idolises the Aleutians, and begins a love affair with Catherine, both desperate to forget their humanity and embrace the alien.

What will be left for the humans when the Aleutians leave? What will the Aleutians take with them from their time on earth? Could humanity have changed them as much as they changed it?

Dark, violent, political and emotional, PHOENIX CAFÉ is the third book in Gwyneth Jones’ critically acclaimed Aleutians Trilogy.

Remember what it’s like to last an entire night without sleep? That dull but constant headache. The feeling of your brain on edge. How easily irritated you were. How difficult it was to concentrate, even on seemingly menial tasks. It was just a single restless night, but everything felt just a little bit harder to do, and the only real comfort was knowing your head would finally hit the pillow at the end of the day, and when you awoke the next morning everything would return to normal.

But what if sleep didn’t come the next night? Or the night after? What might happen if you, your friends and family, your coworkers, the strangers you pass on the street, all slowly began to realize that rest might not ever come again?

How slowly might the world fall apart? How long would it take for a society without sleep to descend into chaos?

Sleep Over is collection of waking nightmares, a scrapbook of the haunting and poignant stories from those trapped in a world where the pillars of society are crumbling, and madness is slowly descending on a planet without rest.

Online vigilantism turns social media into a deadly gamble.

A freelance journalist grapples with the ethics of turning in footage of mass suicide.

A kidnapped hypnotist is held hostage by those at wit’s end for a cure.

In Sleep Over, these stories are just the beginning. Before the Longest Day, the world record was eleven days without sleep. It turns out most of us can go much longer.

A collection of science fiction short stories from the master author of THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS and THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS.

In 1941, Roy Sabre’s girlfriend Betty mysteriously disappears.

Ten years later he has constructed a time-machine and his first trip is to go back to find her.

But his arrival is observed and his machine attacked and damaged as it departs – instead of returning to 1951, it travels to the far future where mankind has disappeared and the Earth is under the control of machines controlled by insects.

Roy finds that several other time-travellers, due to damage and malfunction, have been cast forward to the same time . . .

Stories included:
– “Wanderers of Time”
– “Derelict of Space”
– “Child of Power”
– “The Last Lunarians”
– “The Puff-ball Menace”

Who would lay time to rest, or raise it up from its tomb?
The Ancients of Days – humans returned from a long exile in the depths of time and space and history – brought heresy and doubt to the artificial world of Confluence, and ignited a terrible civil war, of all the varied creatures of Confluence’s ten thousand genetically manipulated bloodlines, only young Yama holds the power to end the conflict, for who ever controls him controls the myriad machines of the world. Though now a helpless captive being forged intoa weapon of horrific consequence, Yama must win the struggle to reclaim his soul, and complete his search for the true story of his origin – a story mapped eons before his birth.

The anatomy of fear is the unknown. The essence of terror is contained in the phrase “What if?” Suppose the dead should return? Are there invisible phychic entities hovering on the fringe of the physical world? Can the power of evil manifest itself in tangible form and launch world shattering violence against humanity?

The most gripping fear lies within the human mind. Lana Davis was a normal, healthy, sane young woman to all outward appearances but the Unknown was laying siege to her mind. By day her work kept the worst of the Terror at bay, but at night it returned. Time passed and Fear grew greater…Fear was embodied in a mysterious effigy which stood beside her bed . . . Fear lurked in a weird voice on the telephone.

Lana Davis ran screaming into the night – unable to face Fear any longer. The stranger who found her apparently knew more about her problems than she did; Lana found herself involved in a macabre new environment where Fear had expelled reality leaving the stranger as the only link with the world she had once known. Dark supernatural powers contended with insanity for Lana’s very soul, as she hovered on the brink of unreality and annihilation.

‘Murder on Christmas day’ is the newspaper headline no one wanted to read…

A true classic from the golden age of crime fiction.

‘Brilliant’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

When a small-town schoolteacher is discovered dead, beheaded, and tied to a T-shaped cross on December 25th, Ellery Queen is intrigued enough to take a closer look. But when he arrives, Queen is met with too few clues and too little evidence to produce a satisfactory verdict, even for a master sleuth such as himself, and so returns home, defeated.

But when an identical murder occurs – followed by several more – Queen discovers a horrific connection to a strange cult. This is a disturbing puzzle unlike anything he’s encountered before, and it will take all of his powers of deduction to uncover the killer.

The day the Time Storm came, Marc Despard was one of the handful to survive – or keep a remnant of sanity. Mist walls moving endlessly across the surface of the Earth, created a devastated, shifting patchwork of temporal anarchy, wrenching both inanimate and living things between the past and the future, beyond all hope of return.

But Despard saw strange, dazzling patterns in his head that he knew were instruments that might enable him to beat the Time Storm.
Travelling through the violent, terrifying landscape of an ever-changing world, slowly gathering others around him, he began to realise his awe-inspiring mission.

He, Marc Despard, must become nothing less than master of the universe – what men call God.

The dense forests and forbidding jungles of Africa harbour innumerable uncanny mysteries, dangers and horrors.

Among these, often reported though little known, is a secret society of Leopard Men. By day and night they are the terror of the vast domain they frequent. Their orgies, their rites, their ruthless power form the basis of this series of adventures, of which Tarzan of the Apes is the central figure.

Adding to the suspense, an absorbing detail of interest is the mysterious quest of a beautiful American girl braving the dangers of the Dark Continent alone; while nonetheless interesting are two luckless and poverty-stricken white ivory poachers, whose trails cross those of both the Lord of the Jungle and the lone girl – trails that lead three of them to the forbidden precincts of the Holy of Holies of the Leopard Men, where no white man has ever been and returned alive.

Jephraim Tallow went naked to his mirror and viewed his strange body – stranger now for the absence of a navel. The blood had gone and so had his navel. Tallow deliberated upon this discovery and then, frowning, returned to bed.

A number of hours later, Tallow awoke, put his hand into his mouth and found no blood, slid his large hand down his scrawny length and found no navel. He sighed and arose, donned his sackcloth clothes, opened the door of the hovel and looked out into the dark day full of mist. The mist was coming off the river, close by.

This is the story of Jephraim Tallow’s obsession with a mysterious golden barge, which he follows down-river, in the belief that, should he be able to board it, the answers to the mystery of his existence will be made clear.

During the day a blazing and merciless sun beat down on “the boy” and at night a friendless and cold darkness enveloped him. It was a bleak and lonely countryside over which he had been wandering for ten years. A rare tree, bird or wild animal was the only life he encountered during his desolate trek through his young years of roaming. Infrequently, he was fortunate enough to find shelter and food in the shops of deserted villages; otherwise he foraged what he could from the nearly barren land. Contact with other humans was his innermost and greatest fear.

But the day came when his curiosity overcame his sensibilities of self-preservation and he was drawn to the sound of a great wailing not far from a place where he had come to rest.

Form that moment on his whole existence took on a radical change. His wanderings became a kaleidoscope of adventures, emotions, and responsibilities – never static, forever mobile, and potentially dangerous. There were moments when it would have been easier to turn his back, return to old ways, but somehow he knew this was an impossibility. He accepted his new fate, but still feared the greatest of all commitments until it was too late for him.

This fantasy adventure will not fail to excite and stir in every reader memories and emotions of seemingly forgotten times and moments.