Epic Classics

Scholar Phelan Cle is researching Bone Plain - which has been studied for the last 500 years, though no one has been able to locate it as a real place. Archaeologist Jonah Cle, Phelan's father, is also hunting through time, piecing history together from forgotten trinkets. When they unearth a disk marked with ancient runes, Beatrice pursues the secrets of a lost language that she suddenly notices all around her, hidden in plain sight.

From a High Tower is newest adventure in Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters series, featuring a retelling of Rapunzel's not-so-happily-ever-after ending.

Composto da tre romanzi pubblicati in Gran Bretagna fra il 1954 e il 1955, Il Signore degli Anelli è uno dei più grandi cicli narrativi del XX secolo. J.R. R. Tolkien ha creato un mondo e un epos che da sempre affascinano e influenzano lettori e scrittori di tutto il mondo. La Compagnia dell’Anello si apre nella Contea, un idilliaco paese agricolo dove vivono gli Hobbit, piccoli esseri lieti, saggi e longevi.

Tyen is teaching mechanical magic at a school respected throughout the worlds. News arrives that the formidable ruler of all worlds is back and enforcing his old laws - including the one forbidding schools of magic. As teachers and students flee, Tyen is left with no home and no purpose...except the promise he made to Vella. Tyen must decide what he is willing to do to free her. After five years among the tapestry weavers of Schpeta, Rielle's peaceful new life has been shattered by a local war.

“His multicultural viewpoint may yet give us the best SF novel of all time” — AnalogFor twenty thousand years, the godlike Inquestors have held sway over the one million worlds of the Dispersal of Man. S.P. Somtow’s limitless imagination has created a universe of breathtaking majesty, amazing beauty, and shattering cruelty. In games of makrugh played in elegant floating palaces, planets are destroyed or saved to preserve the balance of the galaxy. Exotic languages and customs, servocorpses, tachyon bubbles, childsolders with implanted laser-irises, people bins that hold populations ...

Here is Old Man's War author John Scalzi's sendup of the heroic fantasy genre, now a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

Returning to Terre d'Ange, Moirin finds the royal family broken. Wracked by unrelenting grief at the loss of his wife, Queen Jehanne, King Daniel is unable to rule. Prince Thierry, leading an expedition to explore the deadly jungles of Terra Nova, is halfway across the world. And three-year-old Desiree is a vision of her mother: tempestuous, intelligent, and fiery, but desperately lonely and a vulnerable pawn in a game of shifting political allegiances. As tensions mount, King Daniel asks that Moirin become Desirée's oath-sworn protector.

Catherine Helstone's brother Laon has disappeared in Arcadia, legendary land of the magical fae. Desperate for news of him, she makes the perilous journey, but once there, she finds herself alone and isolated in the sinister house of Gethsemane. At last there comes news: Her beloved brother is riding to be reunited with her soon - but the Queen of the Fae and her insane court are hard on his heels.

Rosamund is an Earth Master in the Schwarzwald, the ancient Black Forest of Germany. Since the age of 10, she has lived with her teacher, the Hunt Master and Earth Magician of the Schwarzwald Foresters, a man she calls "Papa". Her adoptive Papa rescued her after her original Earth Master teacher, an old woman who lived alone in a small cottage in the forest, was brutally murdered by werewolves. Rosa herself barely escaped, and this terrifying incident molded the course of her future.

In an alternate world where the Dark Ages never ended, "the Evil" that arises every 500 years has prevented all manner of technological advancement, even well into the 20th century. The son of a powerful English noble, young Duncan Standish has always longed to be a soldier of the Lord, and now he's been offered a rare opportunity to fulfill his dream.

To defeat his greatest enemy, he may have to become his greatest fear.... Now that he's come home, Wardin is determined to reclaim all that was lost. But when his enemies unite against him, he finds himself outnumbered and outmatched, and his kingdom in more danger than ever. Amid these threats comes a chilling warning against walking the same treacherous path as his father before him. Desperate not to repeat the failures of his forebears, Wardin turns to mysterious new allies and perilous new magic. And even that may not be enough.

The Witch's Reign...a land of unnatural hellish cold ruled over by the Ice Witch herself, who is in turn guarded by three creatures - Wolf, Bear, and Raven. Those lovely beasts derive their power directly from their mistress and just happen to kill any who cross their paths. To get there, you first must pass through the Dragon's Ground. Full of, you guessed it, dragons who for the record, also do not like trespassers. Sounds like a fun place to go, doesn't it? Yeah, not so much.

As the young student of the cruel, brilliant artist Vincent Rushkin, Isabelle Copley discovered that she could paint images so vividly real they brought her wildest fantasies to life. Now, 20 years later, Isabelle must come to terms with the shattering memories she has long denied and unlock the slumbering power of her brush. And, in a dark reckoning with her old master, she must find the courage to live out her dreams and bring the magic back to life.

In 1886, a mysterious travelling circus becomes an international sensation. Open only at night, constructed entirely in black and white, Le Cirque des Rêves delights all who wander its circular paths and warm themselves at its bonfire. Although there are acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists, the Circus of Dreams is no conventional spectacle. Some tents contain clouds, some ice.

England is overrun by dragons of all shapes and sizes. Most people are blissfully unaware of them and the Pendragon Treaty that keeps the peace between human and dragon kind. Only those born with preternatural hearing, like Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet are able to hear and converse with dragonkind.

Now that Drew has become even more powerful by stepping into the Foundation Realm, new challenges await him. He is quietly growing his school and sect, and allowing his students to recruit whoever they want so he can take it easy. Trouble looms as his old mistakes come back to haunt him. The entire planet is about to be sent down a savage and unforgiving path, and it might be his fault. Monsters are popping up everywhere, packs of deadly animals led by terrible mutants. The worst part? They seem to be steered by some higher power, some nefarious being that holds the reins of the planet.

The raid on Sinskrill was a success, but the battle is only just beginning. William realizes the stakes at hand. He still has to find a way to prevent Lord Shet, the god of the mahavans, from returning to Earth from the faraway world of Seminal. If he doesn’t, Arylyn will be destroyed. But strange visions plague his mind: an albino monster who infects William with anger. It is Sapient Dormant, the Overward of the necrosed and tasked by Shet to recover a long lost talisman of power.

While on holiday in 1925, four-year-old Michael Tolkien lost his beloved toy dog on the beach at Filey in Yorkshire. To console him, his father, J.R.R. Tolkien, improvised a story about Rover, a real dog who is magically transformed into a toy and is forced to seek out the wizard who wronged him in order to be returned to normal. This charming tale, peopled by a sand-sorcerer and a terrible dragon, by the king of the sea and the Man-in-the-Moon, went through several drafts over the years.

The power and the beauty of The Iliad resound again across 2,700 years in Stephen Mitchell's exciting new translation, as if the lifeblood of its heroes Achilles and Patroclus, Hector and Priam flowed in every word. And we are there with them amid the horror and ecstasy of war, carried along by a poetry that lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful.

Having spent ten years fighting in the Trojan War, Odysseus embarks on his journey back to Ithica. To get there he must deceive a giant Cyclops, face Poseidon’s wrath, escape cannibalism, defeat the witch-goddess Circe, skirt the land of the Sirens, sail between a six-headed monster and a raging whirlpool, and escape captivity on the island of Calypso. But perhaps his biggest threat is his prolonged absence from home, as 108 suitors are vying for his wife’s hand in marriage.