EBooks - Fiction and NonFiction

After her encounter with Hades, Persephone finds herself in a contract with the God of the Dead, and his terms are impossible: Persephone must create life in the Underworld or lose her freedom forever. The bet does more than expose Persephone's failure as a goddess, however. As she struggles to sow the seeds of her freedom, love for the God of the Dead grows—a love that is both captivating and forbidden.

Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel: The powerful and compelling sequel to the dystopian classic Parable of the Sower Lauren Olamina was only eighteen when her family was killed, and anarchy encroached on her Southern California home. She fled the war zone for the hope of quiet and safety in the north. There she founded Acorn, a peaceful community based on a religion of her creation, called Earthseed, whose central tenet is that God is change. Five years later, Lauren has married a doctor and given birth to a daughter. Acorn is beginning to thrive. But outside the tranquil group's walls, America is changing for the worse.

Armed with her mother's guitar, a knapsack of cherished mementos, and a pair of magical boots, Blue journeys west in search of her sister Cass, but when the devil she met at the town's crossroads changes the terms of their deal, Blue must reevaluate her understanding of good and evil.

When Richie Thorpe and his ragtag religious band of ex-thieves arrive in the High Plains town of Suborney, Colorado, Tommy Sandor is captivated by the group. It’s the summer of 1980 in the dusty, junkyard town, and the seventeen-year-old is wrestling with the forces shaping America and himself: the Iran hostage crisis, the incoming tide of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and the political rise of the Christian Right.
As Tommy is increasingly drawn to the group, his mother, Connie, grows frantic. She has been hiding the truth from her son, telling him that his father was a saxophonist from New York who never knew he had a child, and is lying low in Suborney to hide from Tommy’s actual father—Richie Thorpe. Connie knows Richie has come for his son, and though she has witnessed Thorpe’s mysterious powers, the desperation to protect her lie, her son, and their life begets a venom with an elemental power that threatens the whole town.

Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia's Brood span genres--sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism--but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. The collection is rounded off with essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renee Thomas.

George Hills was pulled from the wreck of the steamship Admella, he carried with him memories of a disaster that claimed the lives of almost every other soul on board. Almost every other soul.Because as he clung onto the wreck, George wasn’t alone: someone else – or something else – kept George warm and bound him to life. Why didn’t he die, as so many others did, half-submerged in the freezing Southern Ocean? And what happened to his fellow survivor, the woman who seemed to vanish into thin air?George will live out the rest of his life obsessed with finding the answers to these questions.

In 2047, the U.S. has set up a highly controlled farm center known as the Grid. Its purpose is to feed the nation, but its success during a time of food shortage has made it a worldwide target. An alliance of other nations with a charismatic leader has already taken over Cleveland, Ohio, in its attempt to gain control, and now Dayton, on the southern edge of the the Grid, is struggling in the shadow of war. A dystopian novel that paints an unnervingly realistic picture of the future, the book has at its center a cast of authentic characters.

Constantly shifting his identity among a population choking on information, innovation, and novelty, Nickie Haflinger is a most dangerous outlaw, yet he doesn’t even appear to exist. As global society falls apart in all directions, with corporate power run amok and personal freedom surrendered to computers and bureaucrats, Haflinger is caught and about to be re-programmed. Now he has to try to escape once again, defy the government—and turn the tide of organizational destruction, in this visionary science fiction novel by the author of The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar.

n the mythical town of Winesburg, Indiana, there lives a cleaning lady who can conjure up the ghost of Billy Sunday, a lascivious holy man with an unusual fetish and a burgeoning flock, a park custodian who collects the scat left by aliens, and a night janitor learning to live with life's mysteries, including the zombies in the cafeteria. Winesburg, Indiana, is a town full of stories of plans made and destroyed, of births and unexpected deaths, of remembered pasts and unexplored presents told to the reader by as interesting a cast of characters as one is likely to find in small town America.

Rowan, a young musician whose entire family has died from the plague, forms an uneasy alliance with a young man who possesses peculiar powers.

Tea's gift for death magic means that she is a bone witch, a title that makes her feared and ostracized by her community, but when an older bone witch trains her to become an asha--one who can wield elemental magic--Tea will have to overcome her obstacles and make a powerful choice in the face of danger as dark forces approach.

When two immortals meet in the long-ago past, the destiny of mankind is changed foreverFor a thousand years, Doro has cultivated a small African village, carefully breeding its people in search of seemingly unattainable perfection. He survives through the centuries by stealing the bodies of others, a technique he has so thoroughly mastered that nothing on Earth can kill him. But when a gang of New World slavers destroys his village, ruining his grand experiment, Doro is forced to go west and begin anew.?He meets Anyanwu, a centuries-old woman whose means of immortality are as kind as his are cruel. She is a shapeshifter, capable of healing with a kiss, and she recognizes Doro as a tyrant. Though many humans have tried to kill them, these two demi-gods have never before met a rival. Now they begin a struggle that will last centuries and permanently alter the nature of humanity.

In a world where the sun never sets, one girl must face the darkness in an attempt to save them all. Raised in a home for the unwanted and groomed for a life of service, orphan Lara’s worst fear is being selected during the Harvest. Things turn out worse than she fears, however, when one of her best friends, Karr, is called instead. In mourning, Lara bids Karr a tearful goodbye, thinking she’ll never see him again. But when he returns, mysteriously changed, and murders their other best friend in front of her eyes, it sets Lara on a path to discover not only what happened Karr inside the box, but what secrets lurk in the center of her Faction and the heart of her home. Once inside, she discovers a shocking connection to the darkness within herself that will threaten her faction forever, and that the time to contain that nefarious power is running out.

The line between human and monster is not as clear cut as once believed. In the weeks since Kai's escape from the hell of the Eastern Fortress, things have grown more complicated. She's joined forces with her brother's self-absorbed boyfriend, who controls the Western Army, but she's been separated from Finn, the soldier who found a place in her heart. Meanwhile, Finn runs from his struggles as he always has; he's afraid of himself, his new feelings for Kai, and all the terrible truths he's learned. Tessa is free in the world for the first time, a force to be reckoned with as she travels to the Dome of Artifacts and seeks revenge on the system that ruined her life.