A small tribe of Neanderthals find themselves at odds with a tribe comprised of homo sapiens, whose superior intelligence and agility threatens their doom.

The acclaimed author of The Blood of Heaven and Secessia “delivers a lyrical, emotionally charged study of life along the Gulf Coast a century past” (Kirkus Reviews). In 1914, with the world on the brink of war, Isaac, a nature-loving artist whose past is mysterious to all, including himself, meets Kemper, a defiant heiress caught in the rivalry between her brothers. Kemper’s older brother Angel is hiding a terrible secret about his sexuality, and her younger brother Red possesses a capacity for violence that frightens even the members of his own brutal family. Together Isaac and Kemper build a refuge on their beloved, wild, Gulf Coast. But their paradise is short-lived; as the coast is rocked by the storms of summer, the country is gripped by the furor preceding World War I, and the Woolsack family’s rivalries come to a bloody head. From the breathtaking beauty of the Gulf to the bloody havoc wreaked by the United States in Latin America, The New Inheritors explores the beauty and burden of what is handed down to us all. At once a love story and a family drama, a novel of nature and a novel of war, The New Inheritors traces a family whose life is intimately tied to the Gulf, that most disputed, threatened, and haunted part of this country we call America. “One of the darkest, most compelling writerly imaginations around.”—New Orleans Advocate “The third mesmerizing historical novel by Kent Wascom . . . His style and subjects echo great Southern writers like William Faulkner and Harry Crews, continuing a tradition of recounting terrible things in deliriously beautiful language.”—Tampa Bay Times

'Lyrical, deep, chilling, and prescient, this is a book we will be talking about for years to come.' - Justice Malala, author and commentator. South Africans face a reckoning: mourn a miracle nation that never came into being, fight on to give it birth, or make something else out of 1994's ashes? In The Inheritors, award-winning writer Eve Fairbanks tells the stories of ordinary people facing this stupendous question. These are the kinds of lives rarely examined in such depth: political activist Dipuo, her born-free daughter Malaika, and Christo, one of the last Afrikaner men drafted to fight for the apartheid regime. All three have to remake their own lives while facing the questions: what do I owe to my forebears, and what does history owe to me? They tell of the unresolved rage, generational guilt, and enduring hope that many South Africans struggle to speak aloud to themselves in private, let alone share. Observing subtle truths about power and inheritance, Fairbanks explores questions that preoccupy so many South Africans today: how can one let go of one's past? How should historical debts be paid? And how can a person live an honourable life in a society that – for better or worse – they no longer recognise?

An unforgettable new novel by the award-winning author of the international French bestseller The Godmother. She had been dead now for four days and I had become rich. Unimaginably rich. Blanche de Rigny has always considered herself the black sheep of the family. And a black sheep on crutches at that. But it turns out her family tree has branches she didn’t even know existed. And many of them are rotten to the core. As Blanche learns more about the legacy left by her wealthy Parisian ancestors, she decides a little family tree pruning might be in order. But great wealth also brings great responsibility – a form of richesse oblige, perhaps – and Blanche has a plan to use her inheritance to cure the world of its ills. Spanning two centuries, from Paris on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War to the modern day, this unforgettable family saga lays bare the persistent and poisonous injustice of inequality. In her trademark razor-sharp style, Hannelore Cayre again delivers the sardonic humour and devilish creativity that made The Godmother an international bestseller. Hannelore Cayre is a French writer, director and criminal lawyer. Her most recent work, The Godmother, won the European Crime Fiction Prize, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and the Crime Writers’ Association Crime in Translation Dagger award. The Godmother was also featured on The New York Times’ ‘100 Notable Books of 2019’ list and has been made into a major film starring Isabelle Huppert. ‘A tightly plotted and darkly funny tale of trade in human bodies and souls.’ — Kerryn Goldsworthy, The Age ‘The darkly gripping story of a tainted family legacy’ — Readings ‘Richesse Oblige [The Inheritors] has everything we love about [Hannelore Cayre]; damaged but memorable characters, sharp language, ferocious humour, an undercurrent of political rage, a punchy narrative and lashings of subversion.’ —Lire literary magazine

This groundbreaking book examines why the majority of Australian school leavers want to go to university and have resisted government attempts to promote alternative forms of tertiary education. The New Inheritors explores differences in young people’s understanding of the purpose of university and their reasons for wanting to enrol. The book reveals that although there has been a general shift in values towards the utilitarian perspective, there is still significant support for the traditional liberal idea of university education as a cultural experience. This support is concentrated in well-educated families, regardless of their financial resources, but there is a substantial number of young people from less well-educated families who have absorbed the liberal perspective. The book begins with an extensive and unique overview of changes in Australian federal government tertiary education policy and changes in the public discourse on education. This overview provides a framework against which differences among today’s students are examined in detail. Drawing on a study of over 200 secondary school students from diverse backgrounds The New Inheritors records their attitudes to university – including access, fees and the role of government – and explores how these are formed by their family backgrounds and influenced by public policy on education. The New Inheritors uncovers the complexity of young people’s attitudes, and what processes occur in the forming and reforming of those attitudes to university and what young people really want from university education. Dr Madeleine Mattarozzi Laming is a Lecturer in Education at Australian Catholic University. She has given numerous conference papers on transition from school to university and teaching students from diverse backgrounds. In 2011 she received an Australian Learning and Teaching Council Citation for an outstanding contribution to student learning, particularly at the first year.

“The work of a young writer with tremendous ambition, a bildungsroman of religion and revolution set during an obscure chapter of American history.” —The Washington Post A powerful and impressive debut novel from the winner of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction—first in the Woolsack family saga that continues with Secessia and The New Inheritors. The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr. The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut. “Wascom is a craftsman, and each of his lengthy, winding sentences shimmers with the tang of blood and bone and sweat, and the archaic splendor of his language.” —The Boston Globe

Human activity has irreversibly changed the natural environment. But the news isn't all bad. It's accepted wisdom today that human beings have permanently damaged the natural world, causing extinction, deforestation, pollution, and of course climate change. But in Inheritors of the Earth, biologist Chris Thomas shows that this obscures a more hopeful truth -- we're also helping nature grow and change. Human cities and mass agriculture have created new places for enterprising animals and plants to live, and our activities have stimulated evolutionary change in virtually every population of living species. Most remarkably, Thomas shows, humans may well have raised the rate at which new species are formed to the highest level in the history of our planet. Drawing on the success stories of diverse species, from the ochre-colored comma butterfly to the New Zealand pukeko, Thomas overturns the accepted story of declining biodiversity on Earth. In so doing, he questions why we resist new forms of life, and why we see ourselves as unnatural. Ultimately, he suggests that if life on Earth can recover from the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, it can survive the onslaughts of the technological age. This eye-opening book is a profound reexamination of the relationship between humanity and the natural world.

The acclaimed author of The Blood of Heaven shares “a vivid portrait of 1862 New Orleans” as Union soldiers take over in this panoramic Civil War novel (Ron Charles, Washington Post). The largest city in the ill-starred confederacy has fallen under the soon-to-be-infamous General Benjamin “the Beast” Butler. And when twelve-year-old Joseph Woolsack disappears from his home, he draws his mother, Elise—a mixed-race woman passing for white—into a dark new world. Joseph grapples with his father’s legacy of violence and his own growing sentiment for Cuban exile Marina Fandal, the only survivor of a shipwreck that claimed the lives of her parents. Meanwhile, Elise struggles to keep hold of her sanity, her son and her own precarious station. But she soon encounters a troubling figure from her past, a man who is deeply mired in the intrigue surrounding the city’s occupation. Alternating between the perspectives of five characters, Secessia weaves a tapestry of ravenous greed and malformed love, of slavery and desperation, set within the baroque melting-pot that is New Orleans. A Gothic tableaux vivant of epic scope and intimate horror, Secessia is the netherworld reflection of the conflict between north and south.

Fiercely intelligent, beautiful, and ready to claim her birthright, she navigates a dangerous world torn between war and witchpower. Seduction and stealth are Belinda Primrose’s skills–weapons befitting the queen’s bastard daughter, a pawn of espionage conceived by Lorraine, ruler of Aulun, and her lover and spymaster, Belinda’s father. Now an accomplished assassin, Belinda uncovers the true game her father never intended her to play. For Belinda has found her witchpower, a legacy born from something not of this earth. In a treacherous world where religion and rebellion rule, Lorraine is now in a position to sweep over the countries of Echon and to back her chosen successor to the throne: Belinda. But Belinda is no longer anyone’s pawn. Lured by the sensual dark magic of Dmitri, envoy to a neighboring throne, yet still drawn to the witchlord embrace of her former lover, Javier, Belinda knows that she has entered a realm where power and control go to those who can master and manipulate their fiercest desires. For the witchpower depends on the skill its wielder holds. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Our family legacies, both positive and negative, are passed down from one generation to the next in ways that are not fully understood. This secondary form of trauma, which Gita Baack calls “Inherited Trauma,” has not received adequate attention—a failing that perpetuates cycles of pain, hatred, and violence. In The Inheritors, readers are given the opportunity to reflect on the inherited burdens they carry, as well as the resilience that has given them the power of survival. Through engaging stories and unique concepts, readers will learn new ways to explore the unknowns in their legacies, reflect on questions that are posed at the end of each chapter, and begin to write their own story.