Peter Kenny
21) 84K
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A powerful dystopian vision of a world where money reigns supreme, from a World Fantasy Award-winning author.
"An extraordinary novel that stands with the best of dystopian fiction, with dashes of The Handmaid's Tale." -- -Cory Doctorow
The penalty for Dani Cumali's murder: $84,000.
Theo works in the Criminal Audit Office. He assesses each crime that crosses his desk and makes sure the correct debt to society is paid in full.
These days, there's...
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Tobias Smollett, in his creation of the Scot Roderick Random, exposes the sheer incompetence and injustice of the Royal Navy, as well as the snobbery and hypocrisy prevalent in English middle-class society at the time. Set in the mid-18th century, this picaresque novel follows the life and adventures of Roderick, the eponymous hero who has been shunned by his gentleman father's family on the basis of the lowliness of his mother's family. Expelled...
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Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), one of the most individual political figures of his time, is best known as an influential anarchist communist. But he was also a scientist, geographer and philosopher, a man who, having grown up on his aristocratic father's extensive country estate in Russia, had a deep understanding of and love for animals (wild and domesticated), the countryside and wildernesses. And all this was underpinned by a life committed to work...
24) The Gameshouse
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The World Fantasy Award-winning author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August presents a mesmerizing tale of a gambling house whose deadly games of chance and skill control the fate of empires.
Everyone has heard of the Gameshouse. But few know all its secrets. . .
It is the place where fortunes can be made and lost through chess, backgammon -- every game under the sun.
But those whom fortune favors may be invited to compete in the higher league....
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The first book in Iain M. Banks's seminal science fiction series, The Culture. Consider Phlebas introduces readers to the utopian conglomeration of human and alien races that explores the nature of war, morality, and the limitless bounds of mankind's imagination.
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The...
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Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) was the leading - and the most widely admired - anarchist Communist in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. He lived long enough to see the establishment of Communism in Russia under Lenin, who acknowledged Kropotkin's commitment to political change. However, Kropotkin was a very different kind of revolutionary figure, for he argued not only for Communism but anarchist Communism,...
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Collins brings the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, to English language learners. Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language. Now Collins has adapted her famous detective novels for English language learners. These carefully abridged versions are shorter with the language targeted at learners of English. The Leonides family live together in a large and crooked house in a wealthy London suburb. When the elderly...
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She came to the throne in 1952 when Britain had a far-flung empire, sweets were rationed, mums stayed home and kids played on bombsites. Seventy years on, everything has changed utterly - except the Queen herself, ageing far more gracefully than the fractious nation over which she so lightly presides.How did we get from there to here in a single reign? To cancel culture, anti-vaxxers and Twitter feeds? Matthew Engel tells the story - starting with...
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The first two books in the Singularity's Children series.
Book one - Denial
Tense, intelligent science fiction packed with ideas.
Debt, wars, and inequality are pushing society toward collapse. It's a world desiccated by soulless algorithms, pacified beneath the battle suit's boot, and numbed by the bewitching voices of computational propaganda.
Singularity's Children is vivid world-building. The desperate lives of its characters draw the listener...
30) The Thief
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The Gameshouse is an unusual institution.
Many know it as the place where fortunes can be made and lost through games of chess, backgammon -- every game under the sun.
But a select few, who are picked to compete in the higher league, know that some games are played for higher stakes -- those of politics and empires, of economics and kings . . .
In 1930s Bangkok, one higher league player has just been challenged to a game of hide and seek. The...
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When we go for a walk, whether in the countryside or city, we pass through landscapes full of natural beauty and curiosities both visible and invisible - but though we might admire the view, or wonder idly about the name of a flower, we rarely have the knowledge to fully engage with what we see. When we do, our sense of place is expanded, our understanding deepened and we can discover richness in even the most everyday stroll.
John Wright has been...
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Peter Ratcliffe served in the SAS for twenty-five years. Blooded in Oman in the 1970s, he also saw action in Northern Ireland, in the Falklands War, and in the Gulf campaign. From his early days in the Paras to his time as Regimental Sergeant-Major in the Gulf, he has lived and fought by the motto 'Who Dares Wins'. Eye of the Storm is his insider's account of that exceptional career. Fast paced, earthy, dramatic, funny, occasionally disturbing, it...
33) Fields, Factories, and Workshops: Industry Combined with Agriculture and Brain Work with Manual Work
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Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) was one of the most interesting figures to emerge from the Russian Communist movement, developing the path of Communist Anarchism: he was not associated, either in theory or practice with the violence associated with that time of great change. Born into a Russian aristocratic land-owning family, he was affected by the injustice he saw as a young man on his father's estate and committed himself early to social change; but...
34) Embered Soul
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In a world of monsters, a beast slayer confronts a foe more deadly than any creature the world has seen. As the battle draws close, so too does the Reckoning?
Afflicted by the incessant rot of beasts, the people of Asthradele have never known life without war. The threat of the next Bestial Tide has always been enough to keep the realms united. But what's it all worth if the world is dying?
Seb du Monte is one of the many men and women dedicated...
Author
Description
Collins brings the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, to English language learners. Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language. Now Collins has adapted her famous detective novels for English language learners. These carefully abridged versions are shorter with the language targeted at learners of English. Six people sit down for dinner at a table laid for seven. No one can forget the night exactly a year ago...
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How can you pack for the journey of a lifetime?
George Baxter has settled for a comfortable life, content as the years unfold predictably - until Win, his wife of twenty-six years, dies.
With his loyal dog Monty by his side, George throws himself into his work as an antiques dealer. His business is at the heart of the village and all sorts pass through the doors, each person in search of their own little piece of history.
When George meets local...
37) Conflict
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Action Adventure and Techno-Utopian Manifesto.
Book 3: Conflict is compelling and provocative - a romp through the alien landscape of our not-so-distant future. The balance is shifting. The Forward coalition is losing relevance, and the world is slipping through its fingers. But Nebulous and The Kin are still too weak to confront the old bulls, who, cornered and confused, are at their most deadly. Will the fantastic technologies emerging from the...
38) The Resurrection of the Romanovs: Anastasia, Anna Anderson, and the World's Greatest Royal Mystery
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The truth of the enduring mystery of Anastasia's fate-and the life of her most convincing impostor The passage of more than ninety years and the publication of hundreds of books in dozens of languages has not extinguished an enduring interest in the mysteries surrounding the 1918 execution of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family. The Resurrection of the Romanovs draws on a wealth of new information from previously unpublished materials...
39) Transition
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There is a world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse. Such a world requires a firm hand and a guiding light. But does it need the Concern: an all-powerful organization with a malevolent presiding genius, pervasive influence and numberless invisible operatives in possession of extraordinary powers?
Among...
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Multi-award-winning author Aliette de Bodard brings her story of the War in Heaven to Paris, igniting the City of Light in a fantasy of divine power and deep conspiracy.In the late twentieth century, the streets of Paris are lined with haunted ruins. The Great Magicians' War left a trail of devastation in its wake. The grands magasins have been reduced to piles of debris, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine has turned black with ashes and...