When you don't talk, there's a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said. Stuff like why her best friend, Amber, isn't so friendly anymore. Or why her little brother, Curtis, never opens his mouth. Why her mom has two jobs and a big secret. Why her college-football-star brothers won't even call home. Why her dad would go ballistic if she tried out for the high school football team herself.

In this illuminating and deeply moving memoir, a former American military intelligence officer goes beyond traditional Cold War espionage tales to tell the true story of her family - of five women separated by the Iron Curtain for more than 40 years and their miraculous reunion after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A personal look at a tenuous era that divided a city and a nation and continues to haunt us, Forty Autumns is an intimate and beautifully written story of courage, resilience, and love.

Artemisia is training to be a Gray Sister, a nun who cleanses the bodies of the deceased so that their souls can pass on; otherwise, they will rise as ravenous, hungry spirits. She would rather deal with the dead than the living, who whisper about her scarred hands and troubled past. When her convent is attacked by possessed soldiers, Artemisia defends it by awakening an ancient spirit bound to a saint’s relic. It is a revenant, a malevolent being whose extraordinary power almost consumes her - but death has come, and only a vespertine has any chance of stopping it.

Three thousand years ago, humans were hunted by powerful races with wild magic until the treaty was formed. Now, for centuries, the elves have taken a young woman from Luella's village to be their Human Queen. To be chosen is seen as a mark of death by the townsfolk. A mark 19-year-old Luella is grateful to have escaped as a girl. Instead, she's dedicated her life to studying herbology and becoming the town's only healer. That is, until the Elf King unexpectedly arrives...for her.

Nikolai Lantsov has always had a gift for the impossible. No one knows what he endured in his country’s bloody civil war - and he intends to keep it that way. Now, as enemies gather at his weakened borders, the young king must find a way to refill Ravka’s coffers, forge new alliances, and stop a rising threat to the once-great Grisha Army. Yet with every day a dark magic within him grows stronger, threatening to destroy all he has built.

Some of the parchment pages were the color of cream, thick and substantial, made to last many, many lifetimes. Other pages were thin and desiccated, positively yellow from age, and crackled alarmingly as Van Richten turned them over. There were no ornate illuminations, no fussy borders, only lines of plain text in hard black ink. The flowing handwriting was a bit difficult to follow at first; the writer's style of calligraphy had not been in common use for 300 years. No table of contents, but from the dates it looked to be some kind of history.

I am not the sort of person about whom stories are told.And so begins Elise Dalriss's story. When she hears her great-granddaughter recount a minstrel's tale about a beautiful princess asleep in a tower, it pushes open a door to the past, a door Elise has long kept locked. For Elise was the companion to the real princess who slumbered-and she is the only one left who knows what actually happened so many years ago. Her story unveils a labyrinth where secrets connect to an inconceivable evil. As only Elise understands all too well, the truth is no fairy tale...

A magical retelling of the beloved tale, written for an adult audience.... Princess Anastasia Rose dreams of attending school, but her plans are put on hold when war begins between her father and the beastly lord of a nearby castle in the mountains. Prince Alistair isn't an ordinary dragon. He's a shifter afflicted by a curse, unable to become human again until he finds his true love. When a mortal king's adventurers trespass in Alistair's territory to steal a rare flower, the prince decides to steal a valuable prize of his own.

Glamorous and predatory, the Borgias fascinated and terrorized 15th-century Renaissance Italy, and Lucrezia Borgia, beloved daughter of the pope, was at the center of the dynasty's ambitions. Slandered as a heartless seductress who lured men to their doom, was she in fact the villainess of legend, or was she trapped in a familial web, forced to choose between loyalty and survival?

Magic is forbidden throughout the Four Realms. For decades, sorcerers and those associating with them were hunted to near extinction.But Seri, a Leiran noblewoman living in exile, is no stranger to defying the unjust laws of her land. She is sheltering a wanted fugitive who possesses unusual abilities-a fugitive with the fate of the realms in his hands...

Princess Inos lived an idyllic life in her fathers' sleepy, backwater kingdom, and she was best friends with her childhood companion, the stableboy, Rap. But when a prophecy seemed to say Inos should be married, she was exiled to the Impire to learn to be a lady. She was far away when Rap's magical talents began to emerge, and it was he who told her of the fate awaiting them both.

A visit with Bavia's royal family was supposed to be the stuff dreams were made of for Annie Trevarren, an American girl abroad. Instead it was turning into a disaster. First Annie impetuously crawled onto a castle roof and had to be rescued by Crown Prince Rafael St. James himself. Then her dearest friend, the prince's sister, Phaedra, balks at an arranged wedding. The peasants rebel. The throne totters. Worst of all, Annie is losing her heart.

In a world full of magic and mystery, eighteen-year-old Maia is the exiled princess of Comoros and rightful heir to the throne. Forced to live as a servant in her enemy’s home, Maia flees her captors and begins a perilous quest to save her people. To survive, she must use magic she has learned in secret—despite the fact that women are forbidden to control it.

More than five centuries after Camelot, a new king heralded by prophecy has appeared. As one of the last sorceresses of a dying order sworn to protect the new ruler at all costs, Alwen must answer a summons she thought she might never receive. Bound by oath, Alwen returns to Fane Gramarye, the ancient bastion of magic standing against the rise of evil. For alongside the prophecy of the benevolent king, a darker foretelling envisions the land overrun by a demonic army and cast into ruin.

Catherine de Medici is one of the most maligned monarchs in history: blamed for the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in which hundreds of innocents died. What motivated this Renaissance woman who was born of Florence's most powerful family, and one day came to rule France?

I am not the sort of person about whom stories are told.And so begins Elise Dalriss's story. When she hears her great-granddaughter recount a minstrel's tale about a beautiful princess asleep in a tower, it pushes open a door to the past, a door Elise has long kept locked. For Elise was the companion to the real princess who slumbered-and she is the only one left who knows what actually happened so many years ago. Her story unveils a labyrinth where secrets connect to an inconceivable evil. As only Elise understands all too well, the truth is no fairy tale...

For Portier de Savin-Duplais, failed student of magic, sorcery's decline into ambiguity and cheap illusion is but a culmination of life's bitter disappointments. Reduced to tending the library at Sabria's last collegia magica, he fights off despair with scholarship. But when the king of Sabria charges him to investigate an attempted murder that has disturbing magical resonances, Portier believes his dreams of a greater destiny might at last be fulfilled.

One of history's most enigmatic women tells the haunting, passionate story of her tumultuous life. Juana of Castile is just thirteen when she witnesses the fall of Moorish Granada and the uniting of the fractured kingdoms of Spain under her warrior parents, Isabel and Fernando. Intelligent, beautiful, and proud of her heritage, Juana rebels when she is chosen as a bride for the Hapsburg heir.

Princess Inos lived an idyllic life in her fathers' sleepy, backwater kingdom, and she was best friends with her childhood companion, the stableboy, Rap. But when a prophecy seemed to say Inos should be married, she was exiled to the Impire to learn to be a lady. She was far away when Rap's magical talents began to emerge, and it was he who told her of the fate awaiting them both.

A visit with Bavia's royal family was supposed to be the stuff dreams were made of for Annie Trevarren, an American girl abroad. Instead it was turning into a disaster. First Annie impetuously crawled onto a castle roof and had to be rescued by Crown Prince Rafael St. James himself. Then her dearest friend, the prince's sister, Phaedra, balks at an arranged wedding. The peasants rebel. The throne totters. Worst of all, Annie is losing her heart.

“No one believed I was destined for greatness.” So begins Isabella’s story, in this evocative, vividly imagined novel about one of history’s most famous and controversial queens - the warrior who united a fractured country, the champion of the faith whose reign gave rise to the Inquisition, and the visionary who sent Columbus to discover a new world. Acclaimed author C. W. Gortner envisages the turbulent early years of a woman whose mythic rise to power would go on to transform a monarchy, a nation, and the world.

Magic is forbidden throughout the Four Realms. For decades, sorcerers and those associating with them were hunted to near extinction.But Seri, a Leiran noblewoman living in exile, is no stranger to defying the unjust laws of her land. She is sheltering a wanted fugitive who possesses unusual abilities-a fugitive with the fate of the realms in his hands...

Amber Gryce believes in magic the way anyone does: as a thing of the past, marked now only by the long reign of an ancient queen sworn to live until her stolen son is returned to her. Such stories are romantic but distant for Amber, surrounded by family and wealth. But like magic, wealth can disappear. Left destitute, Amber's family retreats to a forest holding far from their city home, where Amber's love of roses leads her into the heart of enchantment

Escaping an arranged marriage, 17-year-old Ismae finds sanctuary in the St. Mortain convent, where the sisters worship the gods of old. There, Ismae learns that the God of Death has special plans for her—a destiny that will one day compel her to betray the man she loves.

Once, Abrielle's name was on the lips of every unwed nobleman in London as a proud exceptional lady coveted for her bearing, her breeding, her wit, and her beauty. But when her stepfather, respected for his courage and valor during the Crusades, is denied his rightful title and the wealth that accompanies it, Abrielle finds herself suddenly disgraced, no longer a suitable match for any proper gentleman.

When her own first child is tragically still-born, the young Mette is pressed into service as a wet-nurse at the court of the mad king, Charles VI of France. Her young charge is the princess, Catherine de Valois, caught up in the turbulence and chaos of life at court. Mette and the child forge a bond, one that transcends Mette’s lowly position. But as Catherine approaches womanhood, her unique position seals her fate as a pawn between two powerful dynasties.

For fifteen years FitzChivalry Farseer has lived in self-imposed exile, assumed to be dead by almost all who once cared about him. But now, into his isolated life, visitors begin to arrive: Fitz's mentor from his assassin days; a hedge-witch who foresees the return of a long-lost love; and the Fool, the former White Prophet, who beckons Fitz to fulfill his destiny. Then comes the summons he cannot ignore. Prince Dutiful, the young heir to the Farseer throne, has vanished.

Rhapsody is a woman, a singer of some talent who is swept up into events of world-shattering import. On the run from an old romantic interest who won't take no for an answer, Rhapsody literally bumps into a couple of shady characters: half breeds who come to her rescue in the nick of time. Only the rescue turns into an abduction, and Rhapsody soon finds herself dragged along on an epic voyage--one that spans centuries and ranges across a wonder-filled fantasy world.

Sergey and Marina Dyachenko mix dramatic scenes with romance, action and wit, in a style both direct and lyrical. Written with a sure artistic hand, The Scar is the story of a man driven by his own feverish demons to find redemption and the woman who just might save him. Egert is a brash, confident member of the elite guards and an egotistical philanderer. But after he kills an innocent student in a duel, a mysterious man known as “The Wanderer” challenges Egert and slashes his face with his sword, leaving Egert with a scar that comes to symbolize his cowardice.

Half sisters Isabelle and Aurora are polar opposites: Isabelle is the king's headstrong illegitimate daughter whose sight was tithed by faeries; Aurora, beautiful and sheltered, was tithed her sense of touch and voice on the same day. Despite their differences, the sisters have always been extremely close. And then everything changes with a single drop of Aurora's blood, a Faerie Queen who is preparing for war, a strange and enchanting dream realm - and a sleep so deep it cannot be broken.