For Jonathon, the Home Wood that borders his grandfather's farm has always been a source of mystery and dread. Strange half-heard rumours passed among aunts, uncles and cousins never quite add up. More than twenty years ago, his father-when he was Jonathon's age-was swallowed up by the Home Wood for more than a day and came back badly injured. That was when his grandfather forbade any family member from venturing back there. And so when, from his bedroom window one morning, Jonathon sees his father once again cross into the Home Wood, he knows something is very wrong. Deceiving his grandfather, Jonathon sets out after his father and makes his way, for the first time in his life, into the woods. What he finds there is beyond even his wildest imagination.

For Jonathon, the Home Wood that borders his grandfather's farm has always been a source of mystery and dread. Strange half-heard rumours passed among aunts, uncles and cousins never quite add up. More than twenty years ago, his father-when he was Jonathon's age-was swallowed up by the Home Wood for more than a day and came back badly injured. That was when his grandfather forbade any family member from venturing back there. And so when, from his bedroom window one morning, Jonathon sees his father once again cross into the Home Wood, he knows something is very wrong. Deceiving his grandfather, Jonathon sets out after his father and makes his way, for the first time in his life, into the woods. What he finds there is beyond even his wildest imagination.

This scene occurs in what is now West Virginia. It is west of the mountain range, but where, on every hand, are frowning precipices, deep gorges and swift-flowing torrents. On the right, the jutting headlands are crowned with huge old boulders, just peeping out from the thicket of evergreens and creeping vines which surround them. Although not called mountainous, it is a country whose picturesque heights and umbrageous valleys would excite a degree of enthusiasm in the bosom of a lover of the beautiful. Down in those lonely valleys, almost hidden in their leafy groves, was the home of many an old Virginia aristocrat. The great, gnarled oak standing upon the verge of some miniature precipice, and glooming sullenly through the misty rain, seems but part of some pictured scene. Far in the distance, faintly penciled against the misty sky, rise headlands to what seems an enormous height, about them a dark mass of clouds, like some giant's garment caught upon the peaks and blown about at the will of the wind. It envelops and conceals the highest peaks, leaving the imagination to add to the belief in their stupendous height.

The secrets of the Home Wood, deep on the family farm, have spawned mystery and strife in the James family for generations. A mystical portal exists in the Home Wood. A few members of the James family have experienced the other side first-hand. Two months ago, after finding his parents deep in the mysterious land beyond, Jonathon saved them from a coup by the evil half brother of the King of the Grue. He had every reason to believe the Three Kingdoms were at peace when his parents went back to fulfill their promise of rebuilding a school. The arrival of a strange girl from the other side, lost and in need of help, soon shows Jonathon how very wrong he was. Jonathon must cross over again, and this time his grandfather and his best friend Marly are drawn in with him. What begins as a simple task of guiding the stranger back through the portal becomes a terrifying flight for their lives. And the news doesn't get any better. The James family is about to be in the centre of an all-out war. "A sharply-written, surprisingly humorous examination of 'loss' and 'other' set in a grim fantasy landscape". Richard Scrimger, author of Irresistible.

Predicated upon the principles of political freedom, cultural openness, religious tolerance, individual self-reliance and ethnic diversity, the United States of America has been tempted recurrently by the lures of the secret. American Secrets explores this political, historical and cultural phenomenon from many, often surprisingly overlapping angles in these analyses of the literary and cultural uses and abuses of secrecy within a democratic culture. Through analyses of diverse literary works and cultural manifestations - from Twain's anti-imperialist prophecies to 9/11 conspiracy theories, from the traumas of the Vietnam war to the homophobia of the American military establishment, from the unresolved dilemmas of nuclear politics to the secret ecologies shunted aside by the exploitation of the environment, from the questionings of national identity from the ethnic and (trans)sexual margins to the confessional modes of poetry and the poetics of the unspeakable and unrepresentable - these essays reveal the politics within the poetics and, indissociably, the poetics fueling the politics of secrecy in its ambivalent deployment.

Battle Cry Compendium Volume 6 Battle Cry Compendium is a compilation of spiritual warfare bulletins of messages by Dr. D. K. Olukoya, the General Overseer of Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries Worldwide, for prayer warriors and intercessors. It is an outstanding collection for those who seek spiritual power from the Almighty.