""Gravity's victory was inevitable. My fingers were losing their grip, slowly sliding off a rusty section of rain gutter... I felt a strong hand wrap around my swollen ankle and begin to pull. I couldn't hold on anymore."" In a span of 100 hours, 11-year-old Justin Tyme's world has been shattered. Still reeling from his father's unexplained disappearance and unsatisfied with the non-answers his mother has given him, he learns of his father's involvement with an elite team of engineers on the brink of developing a revolutionary new material, code-named C-Metal. With help from the school janitor, Justin unravels the clues to his father's disappearance, documenting his search in a mysterious, gold-edged journal his teacher gives him. As he searches for his dad, he copes with his mother's depression and struggles to protect his sister from their emotionally abusive stepfather. "Search a Darker Sky" is a rapid-fire psychological journey that propels Justin from boyhood to adolescence. "I was blown away by the suspense in "Search a Darker Sky." Truly an amazing story One to be read by millions." --Justin Stanton, age 13 "I couldn't put the book down. I felt I was part of the story. I can hardly wait for the sequel " --Yonatan Margalit, age 11 The Author: As a kid, Devik Schreiner had a bad haircut and wore his pants too short. He enjoyed reading almanacs, science fiction, and the backs of baseball cards. He plays the trumpet and piano, loves golf and the San Francisco Giants, and is known for balancing a pencil on his nose. Devik teaches middle school English and History in San Jose and lives in Los Gatos, California with his wife and twin girls.

Whisper, a teen girl with a cleft palate, is forced to survive in a world that is hostile to those with disfigurements or disabilities.

The best single-volume anthology of science fiction available—includes online teacher's guide The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction features over a 150 years' worth of the best science fiction ever collected in a single volume. The fifty-two stories and critical introductions are organized chronologically as well as thematically for classroom use. Filled with luminous ideas, otherworldly adventures, and startling futuristic speculations, these stories will appeal to all readers as they chart the emergence and evolution of science fiction as a modern literary genre. They also provide a fascinating look at how our Western technoculture has imaginatively expressed its hopes and fears from the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century to the digital age of today. A free online teacher's guide at http://sfanthology.site.wesleyan.edu/ accompanies the anthology and offers access to a host of pedagogical aids for using this book in an academic setting. The stories in this anthology have been selected and introduced by the editors of Science Fiction Studies, the world's most respected journal for the critical study of science fiction.

City of the Mind is the second novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively. 'This is the city in which everything is simultaneous. There is no yesterday, nor tomorrow, merely weather, and decay, and construction.' In London's changing heartland, architect Matthew Halland is aware of how the past and the present blend. It stirs memories of his boyhood, the early years of his daughter Jane and the failed marriage that he has almost put behind him. Here too is the London of prehistory, of Georgian elegance, of the Blitz. But Matthew is occupied with constructing a new future for London in Docklands, and with it he begins to forge new beginnings of his own. 'A glorious novel' Observer 'The descriptions of the London Blitz are achingly real' Sunday Telegraph Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra's Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.

One of the feature stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, "The Shadow Out of Time" is the tale of a professor of political economics that is thrown into a mind-shattering journey through time and space, while his body is held hostage by an alien mind. Horrified and panic-stricken by the implications of his experiences, he hopes against all reason and evidence that he has merely lost his mind.

Devon Richards was fourteen when his father disappeared during his quest to find a cure for a terminal illness in Olaquecha, a remote Andean village shrouded in legend and myth. Eight years later, he has organized a search party in hope of finding a miracle. Along the way, we meet a unique cast of characters including Dr. Bob Goodman, an adventurous Renaissance man who has trekked from New Zealand to South Africa; indomitable mountain guide Rudy Arredondo;and Yachay, a free-spirited mountain wanderer who assists in the journey. In the sequel to The Shaman and the Stranger, Dennis McKay combines a superb narrative with an unforgettable tale of derring-do and adventure.

From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author: a magnificent novel that recalls Iceland's medieval epics and classics, set in the early twentieth century starring an ordinary sheep farmer and his heroic determination to achieve independence. • "A strange story, vibrant and alive…. There is a rare beauty in its telling." —Atlantic Monthly If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to free himself is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Powers's Plowing the Dark recasts the rules of the novel and remains one his most daring works—a mesmerizing fiction explores the imagination's power to both destroy and save. In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual-reality researchers races to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join these two remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet. Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with cutting-edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, she retreats dangerously into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher recovering from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity. "Mention Richard Powers' name to other writers and see them get that faraway look in their eyes: They are calculating the eventual reach of his influence." —Sven Birkerts, Esquire

One of Woolf's most experimental novels, The Waves presents six characters in monologue - from morning until night, from childhood into old age - against a background of the sea. The result is a glorious chorus of voices that exists not to remark on the passing of events but to celebrate the connection between its various individual parts.