"Touched is a gripping novella, a waking nightmare in the home counties that is both erotic and claustrophobic. A strange, fascinating tale." * Financial Times * Briscoe's prose is sensuous, poetic, light. It works on every level.Touched is a finely balanced creation, reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. "a ghost story interwoven with crime, love and horror. Touched makes me mindful of Dylan Thomas, it's so poetic and haunting Joanna Briscoe is a truly lovely writer" * Penny Vincenzi * A delicious page-turning treat." * Barbara Trapido *
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'Savour and absorb the world Knox conjures' SUNDAY TIMES Here is a cinematic tale that is by turns dark and dreamlike, yet ultimately hopeful' DEBORAH HARKNESS, author of A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES 'Intricately plotted and gorgeously written, THE ABSOLUTE BOOK has something for everyone. I'm in awe of it' NEW YORK TIMES Review of Books 'Contains multitudes, spanning the geographies of Canada, Britain and New Zealand the cosmologies of fairies, demons and angels and the genres of thriller, domestic realism and epic fantasy. There are Norse gods, references to Merlin, a tour through purgatory and a strange parallel world where magic is real and humans are bit players in the clash of supernatural realms. Admire the sheer scope and grandeur' DAILY MAIL The Absolute Book is a tale of sisters, ancient blood, a forgotten library, murder, revenge and a book that might just have the answer to everything. Questions that might relate to her sister's murder.Ī book in which secrets are written - and which everyone believes only she can find. People are asking questions about the library. Since her sister was murdered, she's forgotten so much. Taryn Cornick barely remembers the family library. Everything fantasy should be: original, magical, well read, compelling' Guardian 'An instant classic, a work to rank alongside other modern masterpieces of fantasy such as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series or Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. What principles will determine issues of right and wrong, of justice, of the exercise of power? Will their world operate within the boundaries of a belief system? Will myths and stories from the imagined world’s past (or from other, known worlds) influence the present? In addition to these tangible elements, fantasy authors need to envision the moral framework that governs their created world and the values that underpin it. (Think of J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.) Worlds with unique geographies and climates technologies and customs and even, on occasion, languages. Writers of fantasy fiction create not just characters and plots for their novels, they imagine whole new worlds. Which world is she talking about? The world of Wintersea and the Free State the world inhabited by Morrigan Crow, chief protagonist in Townsend’s new fantasy series, Nevermoor. ‘I know everything about this world’, declares Jessica Townsend in an interview with Publisher’s Weekly. Design by Beatriz Castro, illustration by Jim Madsen. Cover image courtesy of Hachette Australia. Suck in and subjugate all resources around it in its unbounded quest to achieve the optimization it is set to do. Achieve and then quickly surpass (far surpass) human levels of intelligence.The basic idea is that an AI algorithm focused on optimizing a solution for a particular objective (optimization function), and able to learn, could potentially: It is essentially a set of thought experiments used to illustrate the potential threat that AI poses to mankind (we could all end up in zoos). This book is on the short list of must reads recommended by Elon Musk and is attributed for his well publicized warnings about the threat AI poses for mankind.Īlthough it didn't trigger extreme fear for me, I did find it very thought provoking and well worth the time spent going through it. Recently I listened to " Superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom in Audible. She is a master of contextualization, situating each fact about the dusty scales that cover Lepidoptera wings or the differences between a moth and butterfly - the former emerge from cocoons and the latter chrysalises - within layers of anecdotes and histories. The Language of Butterflies: How Thieves, Hoarders, Scientists, and Other Obsessives Unlocked the Secrets of the World’s Favorite Insect centers on their enchanting nature as Williams explores how such tiny insects have enraptured both scientists and novices and exposed a seemingly endless human desire for beauty.Įmploying simple vocabulary and succinct explanations of complex concepts, Williams’s style reflects her background in journalism. Lepidoptera have offered delight and visual pleasure for centuries because of their brilliant hues and ostentatious patterns. “The language of butterflies is the language of color,” Wendy Williams writes in her new book centered on the six-legged insects. Edward feels like he has known Eric and his mother Merle for a long time. He has difficulty finding the location until local teenager Eric tells him where to dig for a tomb, where Edward finds two skeletons. In “The Archeologist,” an archeologist named Edward travels to Blessed Island in 2011 to excavate the ruins of a Viking village. The situation seems too familiar to Eric. Tor and the other islanders find him, take him prisoner, and consider sacrificing him to the gods. During an exploration of the island, Eric finds the rumored flower that gives the locals their long life. He also immediately dislikes an old man named Tor, even though the man has given him no reason to be disliked. While there, he falls in love with a woman named Merle who seems oddly familiar. The first story, “Midsummer Sun,” follows journalist Eric Seven in 2073 as he journeys to a remote Scandinavian community called Blessed Island where people live extraordinary lifespans. Published in 2013, the book received numerous accolades including A Publisher’s Weekly Best Children’s Book of 2013 and a Kirkus Reviews Best Teen Book of 2013. Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick is a young adult fantasy novel following seven intertwining stories spanning several centuries. Here are the 10 best candidates for the evil Jedi clone in The Mandalorian movie, and how each one would shape the story. The Republic has one last hope-sending a small force into the very stronghold that houses Thrawns terrible cloning machines. It could also lead to a villain just as ruthless and powerful as the ones seen in the Thrawn trilogy, which would surely result in an epic third-act finale. As Thrawn mounts his final siege, Han Solo and Chewbacca struggle to form a coalition of smugglers for a last-ditch attack, while Princess Leia holds the Alliance together and prepares for the birth of her Jedi twins. This would be a bold and creative way for Star Wars to bring back old characters and give their actors another chance to shine. Related: Star Wars Already Teased The Perfect Title For The Mandalorian MovieĪny of the potential Jedi clones would challenge Ahsoka and the others on an emotional level, either by serving as a dark reflection of themselves or by wearing the face of someone they loved. Apart from honoring the source material or bringing back familiar faces, having a Jedi clone in The Mandalorian movie would serve a purpose and benefit the characters' story arcs. The Thrawn trilogy featured two Jedi clones that played a major role in the story, and since The Mandalorian season 3 showed Moff Gideon trying to create Force clones, perhaps Grand Admiral Thrawn will do the same after he returns in Ahsoka. The MandalorianTV universe on Disney+ has taken a great deal of inspiration from Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy, which means it's possible for an evil clone Jedi to appear in Dave Filoni's The Mandalorian movie. In The Divide, Matt Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice-the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime-but it’s impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends-growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration-come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The prison population doubles.įraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, AND KIRKUS REVIEWSĪ scathing portrait of an urgent new American crisis. Several in the middle seem to go nowhere. One consequence of the novel's unusual structure is that few of the stories achieve significant depth - Lulu The Spy, 2032 is a startling exception - and nearly none reach a resolution. "It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. "Never trust a candy house," warn the daughters of a record producer brought low by streaming services. The title refers to the witch's trap in the fairy tale Hansel And Gretel. Often alluded to is the schism between the uploaded faithful and the eluders, who opt out of online existence and go to great lengths to erase their digital footprint. She is also fascinated by matters of privacy and surveillance. What Egan is creating here is a network novel, driven not by the progression of a plot, but by the links among its characters. Nora was the only one of that group of older women who paid any attention to me. Among them was Nora Jansen, a short, raspy-voiced Midwesterner who looked a bit like a white Eartha Kitt. My loose social circle included a clique of impossibly cool lesbians in their mid-30s. I decided that the latter choice was slightly more terrifying. Maybe I should try to get through customs and run? Or perhaps the bag really was delayed, and I would be abandoning a large sum of money that belonged to someone who could probably have me killed with a simple phone call. "Wait for the next shuttle from Paris - it's probably on that plane." Had my bag been detected? I knew that carrying more than $10,000 undeclared was illegal, let alone carrying it for a West African drug lord. "Bags don't make it onto the right flight sometimes," said the big lug working in baggage handling. Fighting panic, I asked in my mangled high school French what had become of my suitcase. When I arrived in Belgium, I looked for my black rollie at the baggage claim. I had done exactly as I had been instructed, checking my bag in Chicago through Paris, where I had to switch planes to take a short flight to Brussels. Dressed in suede heels, black silk pants, and a beige jacket, I probably looked like any other anxious 24-year-old professional, a typical jeune fille, not a bit counterculture, unless you spotted the tattoo on my neck. |