The Winter Queen has declared war on the shifters of New York City. She is coming to destroy Arianna, and everyone she cares about. But the five boroughs are united for the first time in hundreds of years and Arianna is not going to let a little ice storm rip them apart.

Arianna is a queen heir, at 20 years old she's now eligible for the crown of wolf shifters. Heirs are trained and groomed so that they're ready, should the queen perish. The Red Queen has stood for a century and her power beyond reckoning, until she is murdered. Four heirs will now fight for the crown. Let the summit begin.

Arianna might have won the Summit and taken the crown of wolf shifters, but there is no time for her to settle into the royal life. Something is off with the mecca and if she doesn’t fix it the fae might just make another earth side appearance. Now she must work with the king of the bears to save both of their people. Which is easier said than done when he tempts her in every way and a relationship between them is forbidden. One slip up could cost her everything and in the NYC mecca someone is always watching.

In "After Mecca," Cheryl Clarke explores the relationship between the Black Arts Movement and black women writers of the period. Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Alice Walker, and others chart the emergence of a new and distinct black poetry and its relationship to the black community's struggle for rights and liberation. Clarke also traces the contributions of these poets to the development of feminism and lesbian-feminism, and the legacy they left for others to build on.

In the late nineteenth century, as a consequence of imperial conquest and a mobility revolution, Russia became a crossroads of the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The first book in any language on the hajj under tsarist and Soviet rule, Russian Hajj tells the story of how tsarist officials struggled to control and co-opt Russia's mass hajj traffic, seeing it as not only a liability but also an opportunity. To support the hajj as a matter of state surveillance and control was controversial, given the preeminent position of the Orthodox Church. But nor could the hajj be ignored, or banned, due to Russia's policy of toleration of Islam. As a cross-border, migratory phenomenon, the hajj stoked officials' fears of infectious disease, Islamic revolt, and interethnic conflict, but Eileen Kane innovatively argues that it also generated new thinking within the government about the utility of the empire's Muslims and their global networks.

Dahlan offers an alternative vision of Islamic governance through the history and promise of the Hijaz, the first state of Islam. The Hijaz, in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia, was the first Islamic state in Mecca and Medina. This new interpretative history offers a fresh vision of Islamic governance and law as a positive force for political reform in the Middle East and beyond. Applying key Islamic principles of public good to contemporary life, Malik Dahlan challenges two dominant narratives. He reclaims the development of Islamic statecraft as the wellspring of collective identity and statesmanship in the Arab world, simultaneously influenced and disrupted by Westphalian statehood models and Enlightenment notions of self-determination. He equally rejects the appropriation of Islamic governance and the Caliphate concept by both the post-modern, non-territorial Al-Qaeda and the neo-medievalist ISIS. Celebrating the history and untapped potential of a region where Arab leaders built the ideological foundations of an emerging polity, The Hijaz is a compelling alternative analysis of governance in the Arabian Peninsula and the global Islamic community, and of its interaction with the wider world.

Now a major motion picture starring Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo, directed by Mira Nair. The “astonishing” (The New York Times Book Review) and “inspirational” (Shelf Awareness) true story of Phiona Mutesi—a teenage chess prodigy from the slums of Uganda. One day in 2005 while searching for food, nine-year-old Ugandan Phiona Mutesi followed her brother to a dusty veranda where she met Robert Katende. Katende, a war refugee turned missionary, had an improbable dream: to empower kids in the Katwe slum through chess—a game so foreign there is no word for it in their native language. Laying a chess­board in the dirt, Robert began to teach. At first children came for a free bowl of porridge, but many grew to love the game that—like their daily lives—requires persevering against great obstacles. Of these kids, one girl stood out as an immense talent: Phiona. By the age of eleven Phiona was her country’s junior champion, and at fifteen, the national champion. Now a Woman Candidate Master—the first female titled player in her country’s history—Phiona dreams of becoming a Grandmaster, the most elite level in chess. But to reach that goal, she must grapple with everyday life in one of the world’s most unstable countries. The Queen of Katwe is a “remarkable” (NPR) and “riveting” (New York Post) book that shows how “Phiona’s story transcends the limitations of the chessboard” (Robert Hess, US Grandmaster).

Three major waves of emigration from Soviet Russia followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War. While emigrants in the first wave have been identified mainly with a vague notion of aristocratic taxi drivers, Robert Johnston, through a collective biography of the roughly 120,000 Russians who lived in France during 1920-45, in particular in Paris, shows that this first wave of Russian emigrants made a much more significant contribution to French life and to western knowledge of Russia. Paris was the capital of "Russia Abroad," the home of an emigre generation which included figures from every field of Russian culture and every point of the political compass. Divided and diverse, the community was bound together in the hope and expectation of the downfall of Bolshevism and a return to Mother Russia. Members of the community believed that their mission in Paris was to preserve Russian culture, language, and liberty, a task which required educating France and the West about the true dangers of Communism. As their time away from Russia increased, however, the exiles found it difficult to preserve their organizations and customs and to resist the assimilation of French ways. Gradually the original refugees died, moved away, or surrendered to French culture: by 1951 only 35,000 Russian refugees remained in all of France. The Russian exiles in Paris lived on the margins of history. But though politically defeated, their struggle to defend what they saw as worthwhile Russian values, their efforts to survive, and their contributions to the life of their country of refuge have something to say to a later age, not least to their exiled "grandchildren", the current third wave of emigrants from the USSR.

"It’s easy to feel a sense of peace after completing Fawzia Gilani’s Cinderella. This humble version of the classic fairy tale is a gentle reminder that victory comes as much from a peaceful soul as a beautiful dress and a dramatic confrontation." - Luxury Reading Cinderella is one of the oldest, best-known, and most loved stories worldwide, with hundreds of cultural variants and re-tellings from ancient Egypt and China to the present day. In this version we follow the trials and tribulations of the sweet, gentle, and pious Zahra when her parents die and she is left at the mercy of an uncaring stepmother and stepsisters. This is a well-crafted Islamic version of the classic tale in which faith, goodness, and prayer are rewarded in the end. The charming, richly detailed illustrations of Shireen Adams, set in medieval Andalusia, help bring the text to life.