"One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan - today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures. Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the...

"Solenne Bonet is DoS--a Descendant of Slave--and has always known that her destiny would be in the service of men. At school, it is what she has been trained for, waiting for an algorithm to assign her to a white man, one of the thousands who sign up to be contract holders. She knows that there are girls who hope to be more than Maid or Mammy, who whisper about how they will get a white man to sign their freedom, how they will be sweet, but not sweet...

"St Mary's is under investigation. Their director has been shot and Max is Number One Suspect. Can things get any worse? We all know the answer to that one. Max needs to get away -- fast -- and a Brilliant Idea soon leads her to a full-scale uprising in twentieth-century China. If she can come by a historical treasure or two in the process, even better. That is, if she makes it out alive. Then there's the small matter of Insight -- the sinister organisation...

"Blue Lard is an act of desecration. Blue Lard is what's left after the towering masterpieces of Russian literature have been blown to smithereens, the most graphic, shocking, controversial, and celebrated book to be published in Russia since the end of Communism. Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999—a crowd of angry Putin supporters gathered in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater to toss shredded copies of Sorokin’s books into an...