While the warlike and merciless Aenir wreak havoc upon the territory outside the mountain stronghold of the clans, Sigarni, the Hawk Queen, arrives in a parallel version of her own universe through a gate in space and time. Taliesen, last of the gatekeepers, has no idea why she has come. But he knows that heroes are needed and grants her passage into the ravaged land. Only Caswallon-loner, warrior, and thief-realizes the true extent of the danger and the mayhem that his people will come to face. As Taliesen tries to discover Sigarni’s purpose, Caswallon must attempt to unite the clans to overcome their greatest peril.

«John Updike's twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows its hero, Owen Mackenzie, from his birth in the semi-rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. In between these two settlements comes Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen, an early computer programmer, founds with a partner, Ed Mervine, the successful firm of E-O Data, which is housed in an old gun factory on the Chunkaunkabaug River. Owen's education (Bildung) is not merely technical but liberal, as the humanity of his three villages, especially that of their female citizens, works to disengage him from his youthful innocence. As a child he early felt an abyss of calamity beneath the sunny surface quotidian, yet also had a dreamlike sense of leading a charmed existence. The women of his life, including his wives, Phyllis and Julia, shed what light they can. At one juncture he reflects, «How lovely she is, naked in the dark! How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!» His life as a sexual being merges with the communal shelter of villages: «A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall.» This delightful, witty, passionate novel runs from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century.»

The World According to Garp is a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. A worldwide bestseller since its publication in 1978, Irving's classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T.S. Garp, novelist and bastard son of Jenny Fields — a feminist leader ahead of her time. Beyond that, The World According to Garp virtually defies synopsis.

In the days before the Civil War, there lived a Louisiana people unique in Southern history. For though they were descended from African slaves, they were also descended from the French and Spanish who had enslaved them. They were the gens de couleur libres-the Free People of Color-and in this dazzling historical novel, Anne Rice chronicles the lives of four of their number, men and women caught perilously between the worlds of master and slave, privilege and oppression, passion and pain...