Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge
The Brinkers are very poor and their children Hans and Gretel want to compete in a race to win some silver skates. Their own skates are wooden, no match for the opposition, but with help from a stranger they are given a chance to win.
In the winter palace, the King's new physician has more enemies than she at first realises. But then she also has more remedies to hand than those who wish her ill can know about. In another palace across the mountains, in the service of the regicidal Protector General, the chief bodyguard too has his enemies. He also has at least one person he cares for deeply and who cares for him, though neither can risk saying so.
Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the civilisation based around the planet Golter. Now she is hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes that she is the last obstacle before the faith’s apotheosis, and her only hope of escape is to find the last of the apocalyptically powerful Lazy Guns before the Huhsz find her. Her journey through the exotic Golterian system is a destructive and savage odyssey into her past, and that of her family and of the system itself.
Of all the sword fights Duncan MacLeod has fought over the centuries, the toughest have been against an Immortal named Pieter Gatlan. Every ten years, Gatlan searches Duncan out – and every ten years, Duncan is defeated… but not beheaded. What is Gatlan’s grand plan? And this time, will the Highlander triumph?Read by Adrian Paul (Duncan MacLeod) and Trevor Cooper (Pieter Gatlan).
