Snatched from her peaceful homestead in Celtic Britain, Bivana is transported to the legendary city of Rome. Struggling to come to terms with the loss of everyone and everything she has ever known, but determined to survive, she slowly adapts to a life of slavery and to the alien culture which surrounds her. Her relationship with the slave Philon seems to promise a fresh start, but it also brings her into contact with the Nazarenes, activists in a fanatical new religious movement. When her own family is drawn into a clash with the authorities, she is forced to draw on all her resources to save them. --- Since its first publication in 1999, The Stone City has become well known and loved in its Esperanto translation, and has been translated by fans into French and Hungarian. This revised edition of the original English version includes several additional scenes.

"Opal bibliography, by G. Frederick Shepherd.": v. 8, p. 51-60.

A band of Indians attacked Hatfield, Massachusetts, on September 19, 1677, burning, looting, and killing. They carried off seventeen people, mostly women and children. Their destination, on foot, was Canada. Among them were Martha Waite, pregnant, and her three girls, ages two, four, and six. Captives, 1677, the story of this first Indian/Canadian kidnapping, is a stirring novel of courageous survival, love, and rescue. It follows the captives terrible ordeal and the rescue mission of Marthas husband Benjamin Waite and his friend Stephen Jennings from Hatfield, to Count Frontenacs court in Quebec, and back to Massachusetts with the captives triumphal return. A forgotten saga of American heroism is brought to vivid life in Captives, 1677.

Part Two of the trilogy (Druids, Captives, Warriors) Cast into slavery, two Druids must escape and protect an ancient magic from one who would abuse it. As the spiritual heart of his clan, seer Druid Mallec is trusted and adored by all around him. Continuing to wonder at his past visions of a dark haired woman, his attentions shift to a series of calamities overtaking his people. Mallec struggles to understand why they have lost their gods favour, unaware of the untimely resurrection of the evil Driad Dierdre, and her plans for his ultimate downfall. Meanwhile, healer Driad Rhonwen, Mallec’s dark haired vision, remains in slavery passing from bad master to worse. Repeatedly punished for her resistant nature, but kept alive for her healing skills, Rhonwen survives, unaware of her intertwined fate with Mallec and the betrayal that will soon cast him into chains.

Once, Walt Lawson saved the world. Lately, he's lived in peaceful anonymity with his girlfriend Carrie. This morning, she's been kidnapped. Walt has a single lead: the van that took her. Its trail points him up the coast to San Jose, where survivors have banded together against the gangs who've overrun the north. With the aid of a local guide, Walt homes in on the kidnappers, who are days from shipping Carrie far away. But Walt's past is about to crash down on his rescue plans. For six years, Thom James has been on the hunt, blaming Walt for the death of his brother Raymond. Now that Walt's come up for air, Thom finally has a lead—and he won't stop until he's put Walt six feet underground. CAPTIVES is the sixth book in the post-apocalyptic BREAKERS series.

An American reporter's chilling account of being kidnapped and imprisoned by the Taliban, in the no-man's-land between Afghanistan and Pakistan Jere Van Dyk was on the wrong side of the border. He and three Afghan guides had crossed into the tribal areas of Pakistan, where no Westerner had ventured for years, hoping to reach the home of a local chieftain by nightfall. But then a dozen armed men in black turbans appeared over the crest of a hill. Captive is Van Dyk's searing account of his forty-five days in a Taliban prison, and it is gripping and terrifying in the tradition of the best prison literature. The main action takes place in a single room, cut off from the outside world, where Van Dyk feels he can trust nobody—not his jailers, not his guides (who he fears may have betrayed him), and certainly not the charismatic Taliban leader whose fleeting appearances carry the hope of redemption as well as the prospect of immediate, violent death. Van Dyk went to the tribal areas to investigate the challenges facing America there. His story is of a deeper, more personal challenge, an unforgettable tale of human endurance.

An astonishing variety of captivity narratives emerged in the fifty years following the American Revolution; however, discussions about them have usually focused on accounts of Native American captivities. To most readers, then, captivity narratives are synonymous with "godless savages," the vast frontier, and the trials of kidnapped settlers. This anthology, the first to bring together various types of captivity narratives in a comparative way, broadens our view of the form as it shows how the captivity narrative, in the nation-building years from 1770 to 1820, helped to shape national debates about American liberty and self-determination. Included here are accounts by Indian captives, but also prisoners of war, slaves, victims of pirates and Barbary corsairs, impressed sailors, and shipwreck survivors. The volume's seventeen selections have been culled from hundreds of such texts, edited according to scholarly standards, and reproduced with the highest possible degree of fidelity to the originals. Some selections are fictional or borrow heavily from other, true narratives; all are sensational. Immensely popular with American readers, they were also a lucrative commodity that helped to catalyze the explosion of print culture in the early Republic. As Americans began to personalize the rhetoric of their recent revolution, captivity narratives textually enacted graphic scenes of defiance toward deprivation, confinement, and coercion. At a critical point in American history they helped make the ideals of nationhood real to common citizens.

Maryam Rostampour and Marziyeh Amirizadeh knew they were putting their lives on the line. Islamic laws in Iran forbade them from sharing their Christian beliefs, but in three years, they’d covertly put New Testaments into the hands of twenty thousand of their countrymen and started two secret house churches. In 2009, they were finally arrested and held in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran, a place where inmates are routinely tortured and executions are commonplace. In the face of ruthless interrogations, persecution, and a death sentence, Maryam and Marziyeh chose to take the radical—and dangerous—step of sharing their faith inside the very walls of the government stronghold that was meant to silence them. In Captive in Iran, two courageous Iranian women recount how God used their 259 days in Evin Prison to shine His light into one of the world’s darkest places, giving hope to those who had lost everything and showing love to those in despair.

Captives Among the Indians is an autobiographic collection of four short stories by James Smith. Excerpt: "On the third day, when twenty-two or twenty-four miles from Three Rivers, and seven or eight from Fort Richelieu, we fell into an ambuscade of twenty-seven Iroquois, who killed one of our Indians, and took the rest and myself prisoners. We might have fled, or killed some Iroquois; but I, for my part, seeing my companions taken, judged it better to remain with them, accepting it as a sign of the will of God."