Download or read book The Secrets of Jin shei written by Alma Alexander and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-08-10 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic story of a sisterhood where blood relations are nothing compared to the unbreakable bond of the secret sisters -- the bond of Jin-Shei.
Download or read book The Secrets of Jin shei written by Alma Alexander and published by Crossroad Press. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A group of women, the jin-shei sisterhood, form a uniquely powerful circle that transcends class and social custom. They are bound together by a declaration of loyalty that transcends all other vows, even those with the gods, by their own secret language, passed from mother to daughter, by the knowledge that some of them will have to pay the ultimate sacrifice to enable others to fulfill their destiny. The sisterhood we meet run from the Emperor's sister to the street-beggar, from the trainee warrior in the Emperor's Guard to the apprentice healer, from the artist to the traveller-girl, herself an illegitimate daughter of an emperor and seen as a threat to the throne. And as one of them becomes Dragon Empress, her determination to hold power against the sages of the temple, against the marauding forces from other kingdoms, drags the sisterhood into a dangerous world of court intrigue, plot and counterplot, and brings them into conflict with each other from which only the one who remains true to all the vows she made at the very beginning to the dying Princess Empress can rescue them. An amazing and unusual book, based on some historical fact, full of drama, adventure and conflict like a Shakespearean history play, it's a novel about kinship and a society of women, of mysticism, jealousy, fate, destiny, all set in the wonderful, swirling background of Syai, a fantasy kingdom inspired by Imperial China.
Download or read book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan written by Lisa See and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-10-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lily is the daughter of a humble farmer, and to her family she is just another expensive mouth to feed. Then the local matchmaker delivers startling news: if Lily's feet are bound properly, they will be flawless. In nineteenth-century China, where a woman's eligibility is judged by the shape and size of her feet, this is extraordinary good luck. Lily now has the power to make a good marriage and change the fortunes of her family. To prepare for her new life, she must undergo the agonies of footbinding, learn nu shu, the famed secret women's writing, and make a very special friend, Snow Flower. But a bitter reversal of fortune is about to change everything.
Download or read book Midnight at Spanish Gardens written by Alma Alexander and published by Crossroad Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the eve of the end of the world, 20 December 2012, five friends meet in Spanish Gardens, the cafe where they had celebrated their college graduation twenty years before. Over Irish coffees, they reminisce—and reveal long-held and disturbing secrets. Each friend in turn is given a curious set of instructions by an enigmatic bartender named Ariel: "Your life is filled with crossroads and you are free to choose one road or another at any time. Stepping through this door takes away all choices except two—the choice to live a different life, or return to this one...." Each in turn passes through the portal and are faced with new lives and challenges. Their decisions show a new life—or something far worse. At the end of the world, it's a chance for redemption, or a chance to learn something about themselves. International bestselling author, Alma Alexander, mixes a world or possibilities and paths. What if you could change the past—go right instead of left, fall in love with a different person, change careers or families, or even change your sex. Midnight at Spanish Gardens brings those choices to life.
Download or read book Blindsight written by Peter Watts and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Embers of Heaven A Jin shei Novel written by Alma Alexander and published by Mystique Press. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Bestselling Sequel to The Secrets of Jin-sheiFour hundred years after the events in The Secrets of Jin-shei, the Syai Empire is on the brink of civil war. A new voice preaching equality promises hope for the downtrodden, but the ensuing people's revolution brings terror, reeducation camps, and a chance of brutal retribution or even death to anyone seen as embracing the old ways.An outsider and a child of two worlds, Amais searches her ancestral home, the land of Syai, for the lost magical bond of jin-shei, the women's oath. Her quest will bring her to the very man who may destroy her and her family... and who has an improbable hold on her heart. As individuals, they are antagonists, even enemies-and yet, as two halves of a whole, they are the last hope for the survival of Syai...
Download or read book The Hidden Queen written by Alma Alexander and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life Anghara knows has ended; everyone she loved is dead or doomed. And now she must flee far from her home or die at the hands of her half-brother Sif. A defenseless child is adrift in an unfamiliar world, pursued by the minions of a false king whose brutality knows no bounds. But Anghara has a great destiny that reaches beyond the borders of the troubled realm she must one day rule -- and a miraculous gift to be awakened in secret and fortified in a distant desert land at once beautiful, mysterious, and perilous: an awesome and frightening power called Sight.
Download or read book Changer of Days written by Alma Alexander and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The child Anghara Kir Hama was forcedto flee the kingdom she rightfully ruled, escaping the murderous wrath of her brother, the usurper, who would see her dead to secure the throne. But her years spent in a strange desert land -- honing the miraculous power called Sight -- have forever changed the young queen. And now it is time to claim what is hers. But treachery greets Anghara upon her return to a realm suffering under the cruelty of the bloodthirsty tyrant Sif. In the dungeons of her enemy, she awaits an inevitable death, robbed of the gift that set her apart from all others. Yet those who have sworn to defend her will not rest until their cherished queen is safe, including one whose noble heart belongs to her alone. For young Anghara's remarkable destiny is greater than crowns and countries -- greater even than the fearsome Old Gods who must stand down to make way for the Changer of Days.
Download or read book Empress written by Evelyn McCune and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "McCune has recreated the splendor and intrigue of the imperial court in the Tang dynasty...giving us entertaining and informative access to a brilliant time and a complex woman." JEFFREY RIEGEL Chair, Department of East Asian Languages University of California, Berkeley Sweeping through exotic, turbulent seventh-century China, EMPRESS is the captivating epic of one extraordinary woman who would become the only female emperor in all of China's history. The story of Wu Jao, set against the backdrop of medieval China, reveals not only an age of horrifying barbarism, daring treachery, and precarious power, but also an eternal culture of sophistication and enlightenment.
Download or read book A Companion to Wolves written by Sarah Monette and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-07-29 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two of fantasy's hottest new talents deliver the story of Isolfr, a young nobleman, who is chosen to become a wolfcarl--a warrior who is bonded to a fighting wolf. Isolfr is deeply drawn to the wolves, and though as his father's heir he can refuse the call, he chooses to accept it.
Download or read book The Second Star written by Alma Alexander and published by Crossroad Press. This book was released on 2020-07-01 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Parada had been lost for almost two hundred years before they recovered the ship, drifting in stygian interstellar darkness, and brought her home again. But that was not the miracle. The miracle was that the crew was still alive. That was also the problem. Six crew members went out on the Parada, Earth’s first starship. All contact was lost, and the ship vanished for almost two centuries. When the Parada’s successor found the drifting ship and somehow managed to bring it home, the six crew members were not only still alive but barely older, due to the time dilation effects of near-FTL travel. Their return was a miracle – but it could not be revealed to the waiting world. The problem was, six individuals went out to the stars. More than seventy fractured personalities came back. Psychologist Stella Froud and Jesuit Father Philip Carter were recruited as part of the team assembled to investigate the mystery, and to try and help the Parada’s crew understand their condition and possibly reverse it. What they discovered was a deepening mystery, and very soon they found themselves forced to take sides in a conflict that nobody could have possibly predicted. Their world would never be the same again. "Like its cast of returned starfarers, this rich and continually surprising novel is many things at once: a religiously-inflected first contact novel; an engaging psychological mystery; a glimpse of the future through the eyes of the past; and a moving tale about the difficulties of homecoming. I highly recommend it." - Matt Ruff, author of Set This House in Order and Lovecraft Country
Download or read book Ysabel written by Guy Gavriel Kay and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-02-05 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The multiple award-winning fantasy author of The Fionavar Tapestry brings his extraordinary imagination to a tale of mythic figures in contemporary times... Ned Marriner is in France with his father, a celebrated photographer shooting the Saint-Sauveur Cathedral of Aix-en-Provence. While exploring the cathedral, Ned meets Kate, an American exchange student with a deep knowledge of the area’s history. But even Kate is at a loss when she and Ned surprise a scar-faced stranger, wearing a leather jacket and carrying a knife. “I think you ought to go now,” he tells them. “You have blundered into a corner of a very old story...” In this ancient place, where the borders between the living and the long-dead are thin, Ned and his family are about to be drawn into a haunted story, as mythic figures from conflicts of long ago erupt into the present, changing—and claiming—lives.
Download or read book Procedural Justice and the Fair Trial in Contemporary Chinese Criminal Justice written by Elisa Nesossi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This review examines the literature on procedural justice and the fair trial over the past two decades in the People’s Republic of China. Part 1 gives a wide-angle view of the key political events and developments that have shaped the experience of procedural justice and the fair trial in contemporary China. It provides a storyline that explains the political environment in which these concepts have developed over time. Part 2 examines how scholars understand the legal structures of the criminal process in relation to China’s political culture. Part 3 presents scholarly views on three enduring problems relating to the fair trial: a presumption of innocence, interrogational torture, and the role of lawyers in the criminal trial process. Procedural justice is a particularly pertinent issue today in China, because Xi Jinping’s yifa zhiguo 依法治国 (governing the nation in accordance with the law) governance platform seeks to embed a greater appreciation for procedural justice in criminal justice decision-making, to correct a politico-legal tradition overwhelmingly focused on substantive justice. Overall, the literature reviewed in this article points to the serious limitations in overcoming the politico-legal barriers to justice reforms that remain intact in the system, despite nearly four decades of constant reform.
Download or read book And Now I Spill the Family Secrets written by Margaret Kimball and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best of 2021 List in Comics. 2021 Top of the List Graphic Novel Pick In the spirit of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Margaret Kimball’s AND NOW I SPILL THE FAMILY SECRETS begins in the aftermath of a tragedy. In 1988, when Kimball is only four years old, her mother attempts suicide on Mother’s Day—and this becomes one of many things Kimball’s family never speaks about. As she searches for answers nearly thirty years later, Kimball embarks on a thrilling visual journey into the secrets her family has kept for decades. Using old diary entries, hospital records, home videos, and other archives, Margaret pieces together a narrative map of her childhood—her mother’s bipolar disorder, her grandmother’s institutionalization, and her brother’s increasing struggles—in an attempt to understand what no one likes to talk about: the fractures in her family. Both a coming-of-age story about family dysfunction and a reflection on mental health, AND NOW I SPILL THE FAMILY SECRETS is funny, poignant, and deeply inspiring in its portrayal of what drives a family apart and what keeps them together.
Download or read book Human Tales written by Seanan McGuire and published by . This book was released on 2011-04 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Be Wary and Beware.... There are tales that every parent knows and must pass on to their child... Tales of warning and terror...of those who break their vows and kill for no reason other than malice. Tales of saving the lovely princess from a prince that is much less than charming...and what it takes to bring her home, of rescuing babes from parents not fit to raise them, and the reason no supernatural can truly win a bargain with such vile creatures. These are Human Tales. Tales by: Ivan Ewert, Matthew McFarland, Seanan McGuire, Ari Marmell, Chuck Wendig, Sara M. Harvey, Spencer Ellsworth, Ryan Macklin, Jess Hartley, Shannon Page, Dylan Birtolo, Deborah Brannon, Alma Alexander, Renee Stern, David Lee Summers, James Sutter, Nathan Crowder.
Download or read book Social Movements in China and Hong Kong written by Khun Eng Kuah and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Het uitgangspunt van dit boek is dat Chinese individuen van hun eigen inzet uit moeten kunnen gaan, ongeacht de beperkingen die hen door de staat worden opgelegd. Om hun belangen beter te kunnen verdedigen sluiten sommige individuen zich aan bij sociale bewegingen, die tot sociale protesten kunnen leiden.
Download or read book The Secrets She Keeps written by Michael Robotham and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Two terrific female characters, both with secrets. Add Michael Robotham’s clean prose and whipcrack pacing. The result? A book you won’t be able to put down, although you may occasionally want to hide your eyes.” —Stephen King “A premium delivery.” —People Meghan doesn’t know Agatha, but Agatha knows Meghan. And the one thing Agatha looks forward to each day is catching a glimpse of her, the effortlessly chic customer at the grocery store where she works stocking shelves. Meghan has it all: two adorable children, a handsome and successful husband, a happy marriage, a beautiful house, and a popular parenting blog that Agatha reads with devotion each night as she waits for her absent boyfriend, the father of the baby growing inside her, to return her calls. Yet if Agatha could look beyond the gloss and trappings of Meghan’s “perfect life,” she’d see the flaws and doubts. Meghan has her secrets too, especially one that she dare not ever tell. Soon the lives of these two women will collide in the most spellbinding and intimate of ways, until their secrets are exposed by one shocking act that cannot be undone. From internationally bestselling author Michael Robotham, The Secrets She Keeps is a dark, exquisite, and twisted page-turner so full of surprises, you’ll find it impossible to put down.
