A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR – 'a dark remembrance of 1953, when nuclear annihilation was only the press of a button away'. January 1953. Eight years on from the most destructive conflict in human history, the Cold War enters its deadliest phase. An Iron Curtain has descended across Europe, and hostilities have turned hot on the Korean peninsula as the United States and Soviet Union clash in an intractable and bloody proxy war. Former wartime allies have grown far apart. An ageing Winston Churchill, back in Downing Street, yearns for peace with the Kremlin – but new American President Dwight Eisenhower cautions the West not to drop its guard. Joseph Stalin, implacable as ever, conducts vicious campaigns against imaginary internal enemies. Meanwhile, the pace of the nuclear arms race has become frenetic. The Soviet Union has finally tested its own atom bomb, as has Britain. But in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the United States has detonated its first thermonuclear device, dwarfing the destruction unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the first time, the Doomsday Clock is set at two minutes to midnight, with the risk of a man-made global apocalypse increasingly likely. As the Cold War powers square up, every city has become a potential battleground and every citizen a target. 1953 is set to be a year of living dangerously.

(Book). 2 Minutes to Midnight: An Iron Maiden Day-by-Day offers a fresh form of band biography, examining myriad events in Iron Maiden's history in a detailed timeline form. The book springs to life with illustrative quotations, historical notations that put the band in the wider context of the rock world, and then, as icing on the cake, an explosion of color via live photography and memorabilia shots. Great Britain's Iron Maiden has enjoyed over 40 years of multiplatinum success the world over as pretty much the biggest, most famous heavy metal band in history, save perhaps Metallica. The band continue to tour exhaustively, a happenstance that surely will help keep this book front-racked in the minds of metalheads everywhere. A book on Maiden has been the #1 request that Martin Popoff's fan base has put upon the author for the past ten years and now he's delivered.

Topaz Thompson was happy as she was, thank you very much. A string of bad relationships and disastrous blind dates has done little to restore her faith in a happy ever after. And now here she is, spending her holiday time going on yet another wild goose chase of the supernatural kind. The last thing she expects to find in a pretentious goth club in Edinburg, is the man of her dreams. Logan McGregor had always known he could never love anyone as much as he loved his wife, who was tragically murdered many years before. So imagine his surprise when the beautiful Topaz crosses his path, stirring up long forgotten feelings, showing him that there might be hope after all. This is a story of a love that spans centuries, proving that when fate has you in her sights, not even death can keep you apart, true love will always win out. A Soul Mate is forever.

In 2003, Trent Parke began a road trip around his native Australia, a monumental journey that was to last two years and cover a distance of over 90.000 km. Minutes to Midnight is the ambitious photographic record of that adventure, in which Parke presents a proud but uneasy nation struggling to craft its identity from different cultures and traditions. Minutes to Midnight merges traditional documentary techniques and imagination to create a dark visual narrative portraying Australia with a mix of nostalgia, romanticism and brooding realism. This is not a record of the physical landscape but of an emotional one. It is a story of human anxiety and intensity which, although told from Australia, represents a universal human condition in the world today.

Penelope Tredwell is the feisty thirteen-year-old orphan heiress of Victorian Britain's bestselling magazine, the Penny Dreadful. Her spine-chilling tales—concealed under the pen name Montgomery Finch—are gripping the public. One day she receives a letter from the governor of the Bedlam madhouse requesting Finch's help to investigate the asylum's strange goings-on. Every night at precisely twelve minutes to midnight, the inmates all begin feverishly writing-incoherent ramblings that Penelope quickly realizes are frightening visions of the century to come. But what is causing this phenomenon? In the first book of this smart new series, Penelope is drawn into a thrilling mystery more terrifying than anything she could ever imagine!

An electrifying military thriller from the national bestselling author who “writes with a gripping and gritty authority” (Richard North Patterson, #1 New York Times–bestselling author). It begins with the kidnapping of an Army Reserve officer on U.S. soil. Name: Captain Maeve Cassidy. Profession: Geologist specializing in natural gas drilling and fracturing. Mission: classified. Abducted less than twenty-four hours upon her return from Afghanistan, Cassidy’s disappearance from a Fort Bragg compound is more than a security breach. It is the first stage of a large-scale domestic attack that few Americans could imagine—or survive . . . Enter Delta Force veteran Jake Mahegan. The seasoned operative is on a personal mission of vengeance, tracking down his mother’s killer at a drilling site in North Carolina. When he’s assigned the task of locating the geologist, he can’t help but wonder if her abduction is connected to the fracking magnate he’s pursuing. But when a nearby nuclear plant is attacked, and then another, in a matter of days, Mahegan knows it’s no coincidence. It is a brilliantly conceived, ruthlessly orchestrated assault on our homeland that no intelligence analyst could ever foresee—or stop . . . When a third nuclear plant is targeted, Mahegan has no choice but to try. If he fails, our nation falls. The countdown is launched. The clock is ticking. Armageddon begins . . . Three Minutes to Midnight. The Jake Mahegan thrillers are . . . “Absolutely fantastic . . . pulse-pounding.” —Brad Thor, #1 New York Times-bestselling author “Explosive!” —W.E.B. Griffin, #1 New York Times-bestselling author

It was called Denvers Crime of the Century. In 1988, Frank Magnuson, a young man struggling with lifes curve balls, was set to testify against a Crip kingpin who along with three other men perpetrated a robbery of a Denver restaurant. The night before the trial, two dispatched killers lay in wait in the basement of a house in Bonnie Brae owned by Franks friend and roommate, Steve Curtis. At just before midnight in June of 1989, two young men lay dead with a third left for dead. Ten Minutes till Midnight takes the reader into the very depths of Hell as two of these innocent men experience twenty insane moments of pure horror. Five years after the heinous crime would justice be served? Prosecutors Al LaCabe and Mike Little, doing battle with a polished public defender and his eccentric, wily partner, would be at their passionate best to see that it was. The true story of faith, miracles and recovery, Ten Minutes till Midnight will not only leave the readers adrenaline pulsating, but pondering the very credibility and prudence of the justice system.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 launched a vast, global diaspora, with many Iranians establishing new lives in the United States. In the four decades since, the diaspora has expanded to include not only those who emigrated immediately after the revolution but also their American-born children, more recent immigrants, and people who married into Iranian families, all of whom carry their own stories of trauma, triumph, adversity, and belonging that reflect varied and nuanced perspectives on what it means to be Iranian or Iranian American. The essays in My Shadow Is My Skin are these stories. This collection brings together thirty-two authors, both established and emerging, whose writing captures the diversity of diasporic experiences. Reflecting on the Iranian American experience over the past forty years and shedding new light on themes of identity, duality, and alienation in twenty-first-century America, the authors present personal narratives of immigration, sexuality, marginalization, marriage, and religion that offer an antidote to the news media’s often superficial portrayals of Iran and the people who have a connection to it. My Shadow Is My Skin pulls back the curtain on a community that rarely gets to tell its own story.

They left in the middle of the night—often carrying little more than the knowledge to follow the North Star. Between 1830 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, an estimated one hundred thousand slaves became passengers on the Underground Railroad, a journey of untold hardship, in search of freedom. In Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad, Jeanine Michna-Bales presents a remarkable series of images following a route from the cotton plantations of central Louisiana, through the cypress swamps of Mississippi and the plains of Indiana, north to the Canadian border— a path of nearly fourteen hundred miles. The culmination of a ten-year research quest, Through Darkness to Light imagines a journey along the Underground Railroad as it might have appeared to any freedom seeker. Framing the powerful visual narrative is an introduction by Michna-Bales; a foreword by noted politician, pastor, and civil rights activist Andrew J. Young; and essays by Fergus M. Bordewich, Robert F. Darden, and Eric R. Jackson.