The epic story of a sisterhood where blood relations are nothing compared to the unbreakable bond of the secret sisters -- the bond of Jin-Shei.

The International Bestselling Sequel to The Secrets of Jin-sheiFour hundred years after the events in The Secrets of Jin-shei, the Syai Empire is on the brink of civil war. A new voice preaching equality promises hope for the downtrodden, but the ensuing people's revolution brings terror, reeducation camps, and a chance of brutal retribution or even death to anyone seen as embracing the old ways.An outsider and a child of two worlds, Amais searches her ancestral home, the land of Syai, for the lost magical bond of jin-shei, the women's oath. Her quest will bring her to the very man who may destroy her and her family... and who has an improbable hold on her heart. As individuals, they are antagonists, even enemies-and yet, as two halves of a whole, they are the last hope for the survival of Syai...

The International Bestselling Sequel to The Secrets of Jin-shei Four hundred years after the events in The Secrets of Jin-shei, the Syai Empire is on the brink of civil war. A new voice preaching equality promises hope for the downtrodden, but the ensuing people’s revolution brings terror, reeducation camps, and a chance of brutal retribution or even death to anyone seen as embracing the old ways. An outsider and a child of two worlds, Amais searches her ancestral home, the land of Syai, for the lost magical bond of jin-shei, the women’s oath. Her quest will bring her to the very man who may destroy her and her family… and who has an improbable hold on her heart. As individuals, they are antagonists, even enemies—and yet, as two halves of a whole, they are the last hope for the survival of Syai…

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Two of fantasy's hottest new talents deliver the story of Isolfr, a young nobleman, who is chosen to become a wolfcarl--a warrior who is bonded to a fighting wolf. Isolfr is deeply drawn to the wolves, and though as his father's heir he can refuse the call, he chooses to accept it.

On the eve of the end of the world, 20 December 2012, five friends meet in Spanish Gardens, the cafe where they had celebrated their college graduation twenty years before. Over Irish coffees, they reminisce—and reveal long-held and disturbing secrets. Each friend in turn is given a curious set of instructions by an enigmatic bartender named Ariel: "Your life is filled with crossroads and you are free to choose one road or another at any time. Stepping through this door takes away all choices except two—the choice to live a different life, or return to this one...." Each in turn passes through the portal and are faced with new lives and challenges. Their decisions show a new life—or something far worse. At the end of the world, it's a chance for redemption, or a chance to learn something about themselves. International bestselling author, Alma Alexander, mixes a world or possibilities and paths. What if you could change the past—go right instead of left, fall in love with a different person, change careers or families, or even change your sex. Midnight at Spanish Gardens brings those choices to life.

The multiple award-winning fantasy author of The Fionavar Tapestry brings his extraordinary imagination to a tale of mythic figures in contemporary times... Ned Marriner is in France with his father, a celebrated photographer shooting the Saint-Sauveur Cathedral of Aix-en-Provence. While exploring the cathedral, Ned meets Kate, an American exchange student with a deep knowledge of the area’s history. But even Kate is at a loss when she and Ned surprise a scar-faced stranger, wearing a leather jacket and carrying a knife. “I think you ought to go now,” he tells them. “You have blundered into a corner of a very old story...” In this ancient place, where the borders between the living and the long-dead are thin, Ned and his family are about to be drawn into a haunted story, as mythic figures from conflicts of long ago erupt into the present, changing—and claiming—lives.

What was the most influential mass medium in China before the internet reaching both literate and illiterate audiences? The answer may surprise you...it’s Jingju (Peking opera). This book traces the tradition’s increasing textualization and the changes in authorship, copyright, performance rights, and textual fixation that accompanied those changes.

The life Anghara knows has ended; everyone she loved is dead or doomed. And now she must flee far from her home or die at the hands of her half-brother Sif. A defenseless child is adrift in an unfamiliar world, pursued by the minions of a false king whose brutality knows no bounds. But Anghara has a great destiny that reaches beyond the borders of the troubled realm she must one day rule -- and a miraculous gift to be awakened in secret and fortified in a distant desert land at once beautiful, mysterious, and perilous: an awesome and frightening power called Sight.

Able to shape-shift and ride the clouds, wielding a magic cudgel and playing tricks, Sun Wukong (aka Monkey or the Monkey King) first attained superstar status as the protagonist of the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West (Xiyou ji) and lives on in literature and popular culture internationally. In this far-ranging study Hongmei Sun discusses the thousand-year evolution of this figure in imperial China and multimedia adaptations in Republican, Maoist, and post-socialist China and the United States, including the film Princess Iron Fan (1941), Maoist revolutionary operas, online creative writings influenced by Hong Kong film A Chinese Odyssey (1995), and Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese. At the intersection of Chinese studies, Asian American studies, film studies, and translation and adaptation studies, Transforming Monkey provides a renewed understanding of the Monkey King character as a rebel and trickster, and demonstrates his impact on the Chinese self-conception of national identity as he travels through time and across borders.