Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks's sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous questions about class, politics, art, love, and madness—and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, begin to break the rules. Moving from the secluded beauty of the Adirondack wilderness to the skies above war-torn Spain and Fascist Germany, The Reserve is a clever, incisive, and passionately romantic novel of suspense that adds a new dimension to this acclaimed author's extraordinary repertoire.
Stacy Schiff is that rare combination: a first-rate historian and a brilliant storyteller. Using a wide range of sources, she spins straw into gold, conjuring the world of Ptolemaic Egypt in full vibrant color, and returning the voice of one of the most powerful, fascinating, and maligned women in history. Cleopatra is impossible to put down. Her palace shimmered with onyx and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.
Added by: badaboom | Karma: 5366.29 | Fiction literature | 16 April 2011
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Evolution's Darling
In the context of this novel, "Evolution's Darling" is a phrase used by people who envy sentient AIs (Artificial Intuitions) "because they could evolve... within the span of a lifetime, while biologicals were trapped on that slow wheel of generations." The "Darling" of the title refers to a former starship mind, an AI whose increasingly intimate bond with the adolescent daughter of the ship's captain allowed his Turing Quotient to exceed 1.0. With a value above that level, an "artificial" is granted personhood and full human rights. After gaining a cyborg body and outliving his lover, Darling's unique abilities lead him to become an art dealer.
A red mooplane stolen from a flying circus is found the next day on a dried up lake bed nearly two hundred miles away. The unknown young woman in the passenger seat is alive and conscious but totally paralysed. The pilot is missing, but without any tracks showing that he left the machine after landing. It seems a situation from the world of nightmare. This extraordinary case takes Napoleon Bonaparte, the half-caste detective, to an outback cattle station in western Queensland. There, in a race against time, Bony sets out to unravel the bewildering puzzle, with the help of an old aboriginal chief.
The little mermaid lives in a magical, beautiful world at the bottom of the sea, but she wants to see what the world above is like. When she goes up she falls in love with a human. What will the little mermaid have to do to be able to have a life in the world above with the man she loves?
