In this stunning novel, C. W. Gortner brings to life Juana of Castile, the third child of Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand of Spain, who would become the last queen of Spanish blood to inherit her country’s throne. Along the way, Gortner takes the reader from the somber majesty of Spain to the glittering and lethal courts of Flanders, France, and Tudor England.

Prom Nights from Hell

This exciting collection of short stories by popular teen authors—Meg Cabot, Kim Harrison, Michele Jaffe, Stephenie Meyer, and Lauren Myracle—embraces the dark side of a revered tradition. Readers are taken on an exhilarating ride through the terrifying side of an otherwise common event, and the mood is cleverly sustained with an aura of fast-paced yet somber writing. One distinct highlight of the collection is the well-orchestrated balance between the different aspects of horror that each writer addresses.

Music of a Life

Makine (Dreams of My Russian Summers) is a Russian emigre who writes in the language of his adopted France, but retains a poetic intensity of vision that seems peculiarly Russian. His latest is an extraordinarily compressed brief novel, but it is a novel not a novella in scope nonetheless. It begins as the narrator, waiting for a train to Moscow somewhere in the wilds of Siberia, meets a mysterious musician, Alexe Berg, and is told his somber life story. Berg, a son of the intelligentsia growing up in the Stalin-shadowed '30s, is about to make his debut as a concert pianist, in 1940, when his parents are arrested, and he barely escapes, taking refuge with relatives in the Ukraine.