Susan Howatch's global bestsellers have appeared regularly since the 1970s, but a radical shift in her subject matter in the 1980s and especially the 1990s made reviewers and then academics adjust their glasses and stare hard at her pages. Howatch began to take her loyal following of gothic and family-saga readers into unexpected psychological and theological depths, while taking to an extreme, with a serious-novel format, the experiments begun in her family sagas. She also introduced to her readers a character only half-alive in Trollope, the Anglican Church.

Nikki Broussard hasn't always been saved, but she is now, and that's what counts. Happily married and raising an active young daughter, her past is tucked safely away—until a tragic turn of events threatens to unravel her idyllic life. When their daughter is diagnosed with a life-threatening condition, Nikki and William worry about how they will afford her treatment. Nikki's faith is tested as she considers returning to her old ways in order to pay for it. To add to their stress, William is thrust into the spotlight when he decides to run for mayor after a candidate—his pastor and mentor—winds up dead. Suddenly, every detail of their life is under scrutiny. As William struggles to live out the commitment he feels to his dead pastor, Nikki wonders if the details of her past will emerge and damage their relationship. When life spins out of control, the scandalous truth can be too much for anyone—even a Christian family—to bear.

Throughout the recent culture and science "wars," the radically new conceptions of knowledge and science emerging from such fields as the history and sociology of science have been denounced by various journalists, scientists, and academics as irresponsible attacks on science, absurd denials of objective reality, or a cynical abandonment of truth itself. In Scandalous Knowledge, Barbara Herrnstein Smith explores and illuminates the intellectual contexts of these crude denunciations. A preeminent scholar, theorist, and analyst of intellectual history, Smith begins by looking closely at the epistemological developments at issue. She presents a clear, historically informed, and philosophically sophisticated overview of important twentieth-century critiques of traditional--rationalist, realist, positivist--accounts of human knowledge and scientific truth, and discusses in detail the alternative accounts produced by Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and others. With keen wit, Smith demonstrates that the familiar charges involved in these scandals--including the recurrent invocation of "postmodern relativism"--protect intellectual orthodoxy by falsely associating important intellectual developments with logically absurd and morally or politically disabling positions. She goes on to offer bold, original, and insightful perspectives on the currently strained relations between the natural sciences and the humanities; on the grandiose but dubious claims of evolutionary psychology to explain human behavior, cognition, and culture; and on contemporary controversies over the psychology, biology, and ethics of animal-human relations. Scandalous Knowledge is a provocative and compelling intervention into controversies that continue to roil through journalism, pulpits, laboratories, and classrooms throughout the United States and Europe.

We live in scandalous times. Every day some new controversy demands our attention, our emotional investment, and, ultimately, our judgment. Many of these routine transgressions will be understood in 'revelatory' terms, as peeling back the multiple layers of artifice and spin to reveal an underlying, and oftentimes disturbing, 'truth'. Otherswill be recognized as calculated marketing exercises that simply present the strategic face of contemporary capitalism. Yet these 'ordinary' scandals can themselves be seen to be largely derivative of another, altogether more fundamental-and fundamentally rare-form of disruption. Such is the real scandal that accompanies instances of authentic creation. Building on the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Scandalous Times not only argues the case for such 'real scandal', but also shows how it is today being abrogated and substituted through the increasing production of novel forms of state-sanctioned controversy. From Duchamp to Donald Trump, Scandalous Times explores the ways in which areas from art and advertising to politics and social media have come to actively contribute to this 'static' fabrication of controversy, all the while arguing for the need to rethink creativity as a radical exception to the state, and not its proxy.

Newly-weds Caro and Benedict have swapped country life in Churchminster for an exclusive London mews. It's blissful - untilBenedict's sister arrives, bringing with her a dangerous secret.

Discover the origins of the Curor Coven in Origins: The Elder Witches. Part of The Leclair Witch Chronicles. For centuries, the mysterious Cruor Sisterhood has dominated the remote mountain villages through fear and occult powers granted by their worship of dark spirits. But when forbidden sorcery unexpectedly manifests in young peasant Avalina, she finds herself at the center of a dangerous uprising boiling over. At first intoxicated by newfound abilities, Avalina convinces herself commanding such mythic might is necessary to crush unjust rulers and build a liberated magical order from the ashes. But will she become overwhelmed by the seductive whispers of demons and specters from the abyss promising even greater powers in exchange for terrible commitments? With the untethered pursuit of magical supremacy comes profound corruption-one that will echo through the ages to found the very Cruor Academy of Magical Arts joined centuries later by sisters Cassandra and Selene Leclair. The Elder Witches unveils the shadowy genesis of the infamous Cruor Coven before they dominated magic itself through generations of tyranny to come. But sparks once ignited can blaze redeeming lights or raze all remaining goodness to the ground.