To the Point

A murderous android discovers itself in "All Systems Red", a tense science fiction adventure by Martha Wells that interrogates the roots of consciousness through Artificial intelligence. In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest...

Orwell's 1945 fable about the power struggles among animals on a farm parallels the situation in Russia at the time as Orwell saw it; the characters include the ruthless pig Stalin, his idealistic Trotsky-like adversary, and the simple, kindly horse who represents the common man. All animals are equals but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is the account of the bold struggle, initiated...

A novel in verse on a homosexual romance between two boys. Geryon "understood / that people need / acts of attention from one another, does it really matter which acts? / He was fourteen. / 'Sex is a way of getting to know someone, ' / Herakles had said. He was sixteen." There is a strong mixture of whimsy and sadness in Geryon's story. He is tormented as a boy by his brother, escapes to a parallel world of photography, and falls in love with Herakles--a...

The story of Chauncey Gardiner--Chance--an enigmatic but distinguished man who emerges from nowhere to become an heir to the throne of a Wall Street tycoon, a presidential policy advisor, and a media icon.

"Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband, postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of...

Children have always disappeared from Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere... else. But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children. Nancy tumbled once, but now she's back. The things she's experienced... they change a person. The children under Miss West's care...

Spending time with her family at an Iron Age reenactment field site in northern England that requires participants to use prehistoric tools and knowledge to survive, Silvie begins to envision her own future before a spiritual ritual involving human sacrifice raises disturbing questions.

While waiting to hear whether his newest play will be approved for production, playwright Rudian Stefa is called in for questioning by the Party Committee. A girl--Linda B.--has been found dead, with a signed copy of his latest book in her possession. He soon learns that Linda's family, considered suspect, was exiled to a small town far from the capital, and that she committed suicide. Under the influence of a paranoid regime, Rudian finds himself...

Cairo, 1912. The case started simply enough for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities: handle a possessed tram car. Soon, however, Agent Hamed Nasr and his new partner, Agent Onsi Youssef, are exposed to another side of Cairo stirring with suffragettes, secret societies, and sentient automatons. It's a race against time to protect the city from an encroaching danger that crosses the line between the magical and mundane.