"Haunting and bittersweet, lush and vivid, this extraordinary story has lived with me since I first read it." -- Naomi Novik, author of His Majesty's Dragon The world is ending. One by one the mighty cities are falling, to earthquakes, to flood, to raiders on both land and sea. In a time of war and doubt, Gull is an oracle. Daughter of a slave taken from fallen Troy, chosen at the age of seven to be the voice of the Lady of the Dead, it is her destiny to counsel kings. When nine black ships appear, captained by an exiled Trojan prince, Gull must decide between the life she has been destined for and the most perilous adventure -- to join the remnant of her mother's people in their desperate flight. From the doomed bastions of the City of Pirates to the temples of Byblos, from the intrigues of the Egyptian court to the haunted caves beneath Mount Vesuvius, only Gull can guide Prince Aeneas on his quest, and only she can dare the gates of the Underworld itself to lead him to his destiny. In the last shadowed days of the Age of Bronze, one woman dreams of the world beginning anew. This is her story.

For Greek myth fans, those who can’t get enough of the D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, and readers who have aged out of Rick Riordan, this classroom staple and mythology classic is perfect for learning about the ancient myths! As the gods and goddesses of Olympus scheme, the ancient world is thrown into turmoil when Helen, the most beautiful woman in all of Greece, is stolen away by her Trojan love. Inflamed by jealousy, the Greek king seeks lethal vengeance and sends his black war ships to descend on the city of Troy. In the siege that follows, history’s greatest heroes, from Ajax to Achilles to Odysseus, are forged in combat, and the brutal costs of passion, pride, and revenge must be paid. In the end, the whims of the gods, the cunning of the warriors, and a great wooden horse will decide who emerges victorious. Homer's epic poem, The Iliad, is one of the greatest adventure stories of all time and Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling of the classic saga embodies all of the astonishing drama, romance, and intrigue of ancient Greece. Don’t miss The Wanderings of Odysseus, the companion to Black Ships Before Troy, and follow Odysseus on his adventure home. This book has been selected as a Common Core State Standards Text Exemplar (Grades 6-8, Stories) in Appendix B.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

For nearly a century, Japanese writers gave voice to the anxieties of a nation headed inexorably toward war. Not just any war, but one that in the minds of many would eventually--and inevitably--take place with Japan's neighbor across the Pacific, the United States. In the wake of U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry's first visit to Japan with his Black Ships in 1853, Japanese novelists and military analysts, along with a few foreign counterparts, produced a dizzying array of prophetic visions of this coming conflict, creating a massive body of popular works through which Japan would debate its own passage, however violent, into the modern, globalized era. Painstakingly researched by one of Japan's preeminent men of letters, Tokyo Prefecture Vice Governor Naoki Inose, The Century of the Black Ships is a landmark study of a literary tradition that anticipated the defining moment in the lives of a nation and its people.

A rousing tale of American nautical lore and skullduggery, The Black Ships reveals a little-known, intriguing episode of American history. One of the nation's best-kept secrets, rum-running during Prohibition provided fast bucks for adventurous boatmen along the Atlantic Coast. The Black Ships unfolds the saga of the smuggling fleet that, at great risk, illegally imported liquor to America's shores. Drawing on interviews with rumrunners and their kin, government reports, and some of his own boyhood memories, Everett S. Allen reveals how the Coast Guard bravely tried to stem the flow of liquor, and how, in boats too fast to catch, the rumrunners circumnavigated the law.

A groundbreaking history of the Black Joke, the most famous member of the British Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron, and the long fight to end the transatlantic slave trade. The most feared ship in Britain’s West Africa Squadron, His Majesty’s brig Black Joke was one of a handful of ships tasked with patrolling the western coast of Africa in an effort to end hundreds of years of global slave trading. Sailing after the spectacular fall of Napoleon in France, yet before the rise of Queen Victoria’s England, Black Joke was first a slaving vessel itself, and one with a lightning-fast reputation; only a lucky capture in 1827 allowed it to be repurposed by the Royal Navy to catch its former compatriots. Over the next five years, the ship’s diverse crew and dedicated commanders would capture more ships and liberate more enslaved people than any other in the Squadron. Now, author A.E. Rooks chronicles the adventures on this ship and its crew in a brilliant, lively narrative of the history of Britain’s suppression efforts. As Britain slowly attempted to snuff out the transatlantic slave trade by way of treaty and negotiation, enforcing these policies fell to the Black Joke and those that sailed with it as they battled slavers, weather disasters, and interpersonal drama among captains and crew that reverberated across oceans. In this history of the daring feats of a single ship, the abolition of the international slave trade is revealed as an inexplicably extended exercise involving tense negotiations between many national powers, both colonizers and formerly colonized, that would stretch on for decades longer than it should have. Harrowing and heartbreaking, The Black Joke is a crucial and deeply compelling work of history, both as a reckoning with slavery and abolition and as a lesson about the power of political will—or the lack thereof.

The sea voyage around the world by Magellan, the Portuguese navigator, in 1519, recreated by a Uruguayan writer. The epic is narrated by the fool of the fleet, Juanillo, a Jewish jester converted to Christianity during the Spanish inquisition. The novel won the Novela Casa de las Americas award.

The end of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean was a time of social, political, and economic upheaval – conditions reflected, in many ways, in the world of Homer’s Odyssey. Jeffrey P. Emanuel examines the Odyssey’s Second Cretan Lie (xiv 191 – 359) in the context of this watershed transition, with particular emphasis on raiding, warfare, maritime technology and tactics, and the evidence for the so-called ‘Sea Peoples’ who have been connected to the events of this period. He focuses in particular on the hero’s description of his frequent raiding activities and on his subsequent sojourn in the land of the pharaohs, and connections between Odysseus’ false narrative and the historical experiences of one particular Sea Peoples group: the ‘Sherden of the Sea.’

'Insightful and ingenious . . . Intrusion is both horrific and comic, and deals movingly with the consequences of genetic fixes' - GUARDIAN 'Intrusion is a finely-tuned, in-your-face argument of a novel . . . MacLeod will push your buttons - and make you think' - SFX Imagine a near-future city, say London, where medical science has advanced beyond our own and a single-dose pill has been developed that, taken when pregnant, eradicates many common genetic defects from an unborn child. Hope Morrison, mother of a hyperactive four-year-old, is expecting her second child. She refuses to take The Fix, as the pill is known. This divides her family and friends and puts her and her husband in danger of imprisonment or worse. Is her decision a private matter of individual choice, or is it tantamount to willful neglect of her unborn child? A plausible and original novel with sinister echoes of 1984 and Brave New World. Books by Ken MacLeod: Fall Revolution The Star Fraction The Stone Canal The Cassini Division The Sky Road Engines of Light Cosmonaut Keep Dark Light Engine City Corporation Wars Trilogy Dissidence Insurgence Emergence Novels The Human Front Newton's Wake Learning the World The Execution Channel The Restoration Game Intrusion Descent