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In a room with no windows on the eastern coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Thousands of miles away on the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders prepares to dive in a submersive to the ocean floor. In their confines they are drawn back to the Christmas of the previous year, where a chance encounter on a beach in France led to an intense and enduring romance...
In 1975, on the eve of May Day, secret police sealed off a zoo in a small Czechoslovakian town and ordered the destruction of the largest captive herd of giraffes in the world. Ledgard tells the story of the giraffes from the moment of their capture in Africa to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain. We see them first through the eyes of Emil, a haemodynamicist (he studies blood flow in vertical creatures) who is chosen to accompany them from Hamburg into Czechoslovakia. There Amina, a sleepwalker, a factory girl, glimpses their arrival and goes each day to gaze up at them. She is with them at the end, blinding them with a torch, as Jiri, a sharpshooter, brings them down one by one. Giraffe is a story about strangeness, about creatures that are alien. It is also a story about captivity, about Czechoslovakia, a middling totalitarian state in the middle of Europe that is itself asleep, under a spell, a nation of sleepwalkers.
Twelve visions of the future—by turns hilarious, frightening, and relevant—from new and established voices in science fiction. In this book, new and established voices in science fiction come together to offer original stories of the future. Ken Liu writes about a virtual currency that hijacks our empathy; Elizabeth Bear shows us a smart home tricked into kidnapping its owner; Clifford V. Johnson presents, in a graphic novella, the story of a computer scientist seeing a new side of the AIs she has invented; and J. M. Ledgard describes a 28,000-year-old AI who meditates on the nature of loneliness. We encounter metal-melting viruses, vegetable-based heart transplants, search-and-rescue dr...
From the author of Submergence comes a digital-original triptych of essays that examine humanity in the modern age. Terra Firma Triptych begins in a wilderness in South Sudan. J. M. Ledgard is there in search of a still point, untouched by humankind--a goal complicated by the contingent of armed rangers accompanying him. Next, a trip through Rwanda--taking a borrowed car toward crocodile-infested lakes near the border with Burundi--a road trip that unexpectedly ends up at the site of the country's proposed future in the sky. And finally Ledgard takes us straight into a vision of that very future, of a continent poised to take advantage of current and near-future technological advances--a vis...
With touching observations and poignant moments of self-discovery, this picture book follows a trip taken by a mother and daughter. On an adventure to the Arctic to fulfill her mother’s childhood promise, Sari soon finds that the inner journey shared with her mom is the most rewarding part of the voyage. Evoking the aura and atmosphere of the majestic Arctic, this tale captures the unique bond between a mother and her daughter. A free, downloadable booklet with suggestions for further activities is available atwww.wingedchariot.com.
“A precisely crafted and bracingly honest” memoir of war and its aftershocks from the New York Times–bestselling author of Matterhorn (The Atlantic). In 1968, at the age of twenty-three, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of forty Marines who would live or die by his decisions. In his thirteen-month tour he saw intense combat, killing the enemy and watching friends die. Marlantes survived, but like many of his brothers in arms, he has spent the last forty years dealing with his experiences. In What It Is Like to Go to War, Marlantes takes a candid look at these experiences and critically examines how we might better pr...
Nelson Mandela is well-known throughout the world as a heroic leader who symbolizes freedom and moral authority. He is fixed in the public mind as the world's elder statesman -- the gray-haired man with a kindly smile who spent 27 years in prison before becoming the first black president in South Africa. But Nelson Mandela was not always elderly or benign. And, in Young Mandela, award-winning journalist and author David James Smith takes us deep into the heart of racist South Africa to paint a portrait of the Mandela that many have forgotten: the committed revolutionary who left his family behind to live on the run, adopting false names and disguises and organizing the first strikes to overthrow the apartheid state. Young Mandela lifts the curtain on an icon's first steps to greatness.
Epic yet eminently readable, penetrating and profoundly moving, ‘Congo’ traces the fate of one of the world's most devastated countries, second only to war-torn Somalia: the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This is an extraordinary new fable from one of the world's greatest living novelists, two-time Booker Prize winner and Nobel Laureate. David is a small boy who comes by boat across the ocean to a new country. He has been separated from his parents, and has lost the piece of paper that would have explained everything. On the boat a stranger named Simon takes it upon himself to look after the boy. On arrival they are assigned new names, new birthdates. They know little Spanish, the language of their new country, and nothing about its customs. They have also suffered a kind of forgetting of old attachments and feelings. They are people without a past. Simon's goal is to find the boy's mother. H...
In Scotland, a self-appointed executioner dispenses justice to fit the crime. Thus the lenient judge who let a rapist go is punished by being raped, while a man who killed is killed in turn. By the author of The Wasp Factory.