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A chef, a choir boy and a newly minted office grunt are ripped away from their everyday lives and landed on a deserted island. They do not know each other or where they are. Nor why they hear a large computer voice that informs them “The world that you know is not available right now. Rebooting world now.” All they know is that nothing is as it seems and everything keeps changing. Available free on the Nightlight Podcast |
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Vision of the Veil by Jake Stollman YOU'D BETTER BELIEVE HER... Princess Lorne, thought dead for many years, reappears in her own tomb out of thin air. From beyond time and space, she brings back a terrible vision: Atar—her planet’s sun—is going to be swallowed by darkness, and her world will suffer an apocalypse that will turn it into an airless, lifeless rock. As a princess, getting the world’s attention to warn them of the coming threat is easy. The problem is that even entertaining the idea of Atar dying is the worst form of heresy one could commit. Any commoner in her position would be executed. Her family urges her to silence, but the all-consuming anxiety from the vision burns inside her mind, and she warns the world anyway. She is arrested and humiliated, even as the evidence supporting her claims becomes completely irrefutable. Distraught, she realizes that reason alone will not save them. If she is to get the world to heed her warnings, Lorne must become someone she never wanted to be: the bringer of fear. |
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Library System Reset: Overdue by K. T. Hanna The Library once stood proud as a beacon of magic and power. For 500 years, it has been broken. Quinn can barely handle her own life. When the Library of Everywhere discovers her compatible magical signature, suddenly she is the sole existing potential Librarian. Now it’s not only the weight of her world on her shoulders—Quinn must connect with the Library system before the universe itself disintegrates. Once she’s settled, it should be quiet, peaceful work- just as soon as she battles a few engorged bookworms, repairs hundreds of years of damage, and figures out why there’s been no Librarian for the last several centuries. And once that’s done she can start gathering overdue books. All 18,042 of them to start with. There’ll be a helluva lot of late fees to process. |
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The Limit of the Lonely Man by Becky James Evyn is running out of time. A princess could have a solution–or be her downfall. Newly made Rangers, Thorrn and Aubin race to find the cause of Evyn's strange illness, seeking out Princess Sabatha of Rush. Aubin’s self-doubt threatens the outcomes of the mission while King Gough is making political moves, hoping that Evyn continues her betrothal to Prince Gerlay of Dinahe rather than choosing anyone else. But destiny weaves around them, drawing the multiverses and their hearts together. What is Evyn’s calling as the Spirit Shaper, and what does it mean to be the Lonely Man? The third book in the thrilling King's Swordsman series, perfect for fans of sword and sorcery portal and multiverse fantasy. |
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The Bind of Blood and Bonds by Becky James “Special Forces is harsh. It could be a lot harsher.” Treason takes many forms. Once trust is broken, it is hard to reforge. Thorrn discovers this all too clearly, much to his detriment. But someone wants Thorrn dead, and they don’t care how many lives they ruin in the process. Meanwhile, there is a spate of murders targeting Oberrotian officials, and Thorrn’s contingent is sent to investigate. Back to being the lowest of the low, Thorrn struggles to trust again – especially when he finds two of the most powerful mages in the world working together, and one of them is the woman he loves. |
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Ten Acceptable Acts of Arson and other very short stories by Jack Remiel Cottrell There are many messages in this book: Never go drinking using your passport for ID. Make sure to apply lidocaine before ripping out your toenails. Magic might be real, but it never fixes the worst of your problems. Try to fall in love with bastards. You or someone you know may be gayer than previously thought. We’re not going to make it to Mars. A locked psychiatric ward needs more books than a single copy of Jane Eyre. Asking time travellers for advice on your exams is considered cheating. It’s not just human houses that become haunted. The key message is this: Life in the early 21st century is often very strange. So are these stories. With a crisp insouciance and gliding charm, Jack Remiel Cottrell’s fiery, fey, finely-tuned fictions leap from sci-fi to fantasy, comedy to horror, literary realism to romance, and to hybrids of all of these. Featuring sport, friendship, love, health, family, climate change, artificial intelligence, desire, magic, Greek gods, ghosts, peanut butter, cyber pranks, racial prejudice, and creepy medical advances, his stories play with the allure of the past, the disturbances of our own times, and the dangerous idealism of our future technologies – each one in fewer than 300 words. |
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Fyskar: Book 1 of Legend of the Bai by Chapel Orahamm 1692 The Isle of Skye Eoin has returned as a plague doctor after ten years of banishment for revenge and a birthright. Fearchar and Seonaid have allowed the man to set up shop in their croft at the request of an old friend. The Plague Doctor is keeping secrets, though, and killing an entire clan is only the beginning. The void is waiting. |
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Tasmanian Gothic by Mikhaeyla Kopievsky A modern gothic thriller set in a decaying urban environment and lush mutant wilderness. Solari wasn’t alive when the ozone layer split above Tasmania and spilled radiation over the edge of the stratosphere, but she’s living with the consequences—the mutations, the gangland war, and the border wall that divides the affluent North from the contaminated South. Orphaned and alone in the southern reaches, Solari survives the chaos the only way she knows how: cooking the wildly addictive snowrock for local crime lord, Worcsulakz, and avoiding the mutants that skulk in the lush, untamed wilderness of the Fringes. But, when her junkie ex-boyfriend puts Solari more firmly in Worcsulakz’s debt, she runs—escaping the promise of violent retribution with a stolen van and a pair of giant wings cleaved from a mutant moth. Grafting the wings to her body disguises Solari as one of Tasmania’s most reviled and hunted, but grants her refuge in the one place Worcsulakz won’t look for her—a mutant enclave. There, Solari will form an unlikely alliance and commence the dangerous journey through gangland strongholds and carnival towns to get to the Border Wall in the north. Hunted by Worcsulakz, the hidden terrors of the Fringes, the secrets in her family’s past, and the deception at the core of her fragile alliance, Solari will need to confront them all or stay condemned to a life of loneliness and brutality. -- This dark biopunk adventure set in a post-apocalyptic world of danger and decay is perfect for readers of dystopian, gothic, and new weird science fiction, and fans of China Mieville, Jeff VanderMeer, Kameron Hurley, and Tamsyn Muir. |
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For centuries, humankind has been extinct...until now. Six awoke from a dream, only to find himself in a nightmare. He is the last living human – lost and alone in a city of unrecognizable wonders. A new empire reigns over the Earth, a race of genetically engineered humans so evolved they bear little resemblance to their ancient predecessors. Before Six can get his bearings in this strange new world, he is framed for a heinous crime and exiled into the deadly wasteland beyond the city walls. As he struggles to survive in this hostile environment, and memories of his past slowly resurface, Six discovers that he has been marked for death. The empire has a secret, one so devastating its own people would be executed if they knew. Can Six decipher the hidden world of new Earth before they wipe out what is left of humanity? Grab The Ancestor today and let the adventure begin! |
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The Hammond Conjecture by Martin Reed The Hammond Conjecture is an alternative history novel which explores themes of memory, identity and historical narrative. It is also a lot of fun. Are you sure you know who you are? If your memories disappeared and were replaced with someone else's, would you still be you? And what if those memories were not just from another person - but of a different world? London 1982. Regaining consciousness in an isolation ward of catatonic patients, glimpsing the outside world only through a television news bulletin, that is the dilemma facing Hugh Hammond. Gradually Hugh's memories return – of his life as an MI6 officer a decade earlier. But in a world where Britain has been locked since 1941in a lonely Cold War against a fascist-dominated Europe. Are his memories false: delusions, or implanted as part of a mind-control experiment? Or was the television news fake – and if so, why? And what is the role of Carlton, the shadowy Intelligence officer who delivered him to the hospital? Hugh types out his recollections: an adventure which takes him from an opium den in Limehouse, via a hippie encampment in British-occupied North France, to a State Reception for the Deputy Führer in the Durbar Court in Whitehall, and a Le Carré-style climax in the divided city of Paris. Meanwhile in the hospital Hugh struggles to understand his predicament – and to escape from it. But escape only leads him into greater danger… |