Isle of the Dead is an SF published in 1969. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1969, and won the French Prix Apollo in 1972. The title refers to the several paintings by Swiss-German painter A. Böcklin. In the novel, Francis Sandow refers to “that mad painting by Boecklin, The Isle of the Dead.” Böcklin created at least five paintings with that title, each depicting an oarsman and a standing figure in a small boat, crossing dark water toward a forbidding island.
Doorways in the Sand is a Hugo nominated novel written in one draft, with absolutely no rewrites. Fred Cassidy, perpetual student and expert building climber, finds himself hunted by gangs of criminals and government agents. He discovers that a priceless jewel called the Star Stone, on loan to the Earth from an extraterrestrial civilization, has gone missing and he may be the last person to have seen it. He decides to do his own investigating with help from friends and some strange, rogue galactic policemen.
A Night in the Lonesome October is narrated from the present-tense point-of-view of Snuff, the dog who is Jack the Ripper's companion. The bulk of the story takes place in London and its environs, though at one point the story detours through the dream-world described by Lovecraft in The Dream Quest of Unkonown Kadath. Though never explicitly stated, various contextual clues within the story (the most obvious of which being the appearance of Sherlock Holmes (or "The Great Detective") imply that it takes place during the late Victorian period.
Added by: miss-nina | Karma: 10.53 | Fiction literature | 23 October 2010
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The memory keeper's daughter The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a novel by American author Kim Edwards that tells the story of a man who gives away his newborn baby, who has Down syndrome to one of the nurses. Published by Viking Press in June 2005, the novel garnered great interest via word of mouth in the summer of 2006 and placed on the New York Times Paperback Bestsellers List. The novel was adapted to television film and broadcast on Lifetime Television in April 2008.
The novel opens in a post-apocalyptic Southern California, in a hellish world shattered by nuclear war decades before. Several surviving police states have emerged in place of the former USA. Hurricane-force winds above five hundred feet prevent any sort of air travel from one state to the next, and sudden, violent, and unpredictable storms make day-to-day life a mini-hell. Hell Tanner, an imprisoned killer, is offered a full pardon in exchange for taking on a suicide mission - a drive through "Damnation Alley" across a ruined America from Los Angeles to Boston — as one of three vehicles attempting to deliver urgently needed plague vaccine.
