Showing results by narrator "Sophie Amoss" in All Categories

Ruti is Markless. In a society where worth is determined by the pattern on your palm and the magic it grants you, this also deems her worthless. But she’s a hardened survivor, a protector of the lowest class … and the most powerful witch in Somanchi. With a single song, she can ask the spirits to grant her unimaginable powers. Dekala’s Mark is strong, a Mark fit for the future queen of Somanchi, but it’s also unstable. She knows the only solution is to be bonded with another, but that would mean relinquishing control over her throne and kingdom.

After Del’s death, Jimi wants to pick up the pieces of her life and move on. But she’s become a public figure in her defense of chimeras, and she can’t quite shake the spotlight—or her suspicion that she’s being followed. When her friend Dr. Guzman, a chimera sympathizer, is arrested for the murder of a chimera wearing a strange medical bracelet, Jimi does some digging—and eventually discovers that Howard Wells, the venal businessman and proponent of the Genetic Heritage Act, is supporting a hospital that ostensibly provides healthcare for chimeras.

Louisiana, 1875: in the tumultuous aftermath of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest. Louisiana, 1987: Arriving in Augustine, Louisiana, first-year teacher Benedetta Silva finds herself teaching students whose poverty-stricken lives she can scarcely comprehend. The town is impossibly set in its ways, suspicious of new ideas and new people. But amid the gnarled live oaks and ancient plantation homes lies the century-old history of three young women, a long-ago journey and a hidden book that could change everything.

For the past two years, Lee has been laser-focused on two things: her job as a sound tech at a local coffee shop and her podcast Artists in Love, which she cohosts with her boyfriend, Vincent. Until he breaks up with her on the air right after graduation. When their unexpected split, the loss of her job, and her parent’s announcement that they’re separating coincide, Lee’s plans, her art, and her life are thrown into turmoil.

Edie and Violet Bond know the truth about death. The seventeen-year-old twins are powerful mediums, just like their mother—Violet can open the veil between life and death, and Edie can cross into the spirit world. But their abilities couldn’t save them when their mother died and their father threatened to commit them to a notorious asylum.

This collection of 22 short stories by the author of Daughter of Hounds and Alabaster firmly established Caitlín R. Kiernan as one of the preeminent voices in dark fantasy today. Through a cycle of interconnected narratives, Kiernan unflinchingly explores a surreal world where the fantastic and the mundane are never separated by more than the insubstantial thickness of a shadow.

Whitney knows what death looks like. Since she was seven, she’s seen it hover over strangers’ heads in dark, rippling clouds. Sometimes she can save people from the darkness. Sometimes she can’t. But she’s never questioned if she should try. Until the unthinkable happens—and a person she saves becomes the perpetrator of a horrific school shooting.

To Charles Fort, with Love is award-winning fantasist Caitlín R. Kiernan’s third collection of short fiction, a haunting parade of the terrible things which may lie beyond the boundaries of science, the minds which may exist beyond psychology, and the forbidden places which will never be located in any orthodox globe. A deceptively even dozen, this collection includes Kiernan’s celebrated stories “Onion” and “Andromeda Among the Stones”, as well as a number of more obscure pieces.

Committed to both peace and human rights for chimeras—people who alter themselves with animal DNA—seventeen-year-old Jimi Corcoran is torn when she’s invited to a gathering of moderate pro- and anti-chimera rights activists seeking to find common ground. But when a militant chimera rights group prevents her from attending—and saves her from being killed by the bomb they’ve planted—Jimi herself falls under suspicion for the blast.

Eve and Maggie Abbott are desperate. Out of money, and options, they are forced to move into one very old house. It happens to have belonged to their dead grandmother, but the rent is cheap, and the location is killer. That last sentence is a joke, unless you're into a "middle of nowhere" vibe - and cows.

It's hard to make Diane Harbaugh flinch. A former prosecutor notorious for her aggressive tactics, she's now a DEA agent who interrogates witnesses so effectively, she has them confessing in tears. But when she hears from Gustavo, a high-ranking cartel member with an invaluable secret about the international black market, she's thrown for a loop. She heads to Mexico to meet him, and her entire understanding of justice and duty is thrown into question.

The death of Donald Ray in a freak car accident becomes the catalyst for the release of passions, needs, and hurts. Clayton’s discovery of dead Donald Ray upends his longtime emotional numbness. Darlene, the seventeen-year-old widow, struggles to reconnect with her late husband while proving herself still alive. Soon Clayton and Darlene’s bond of loss and death works its magic, drawing them into an affair that brings the loneliness in Clayton’s marriage to a crisis. When Aurilla Cutter, Clayton’s mother-in-law, learns about the affair, her own memories are set loose.

Centering us in Rome, but transporting us seamlessly into worlds as varied and exotic as they are emotionally real, these stories paint landscapes that are populated - vividly, hauntingly - by animals: from squawking, violent seagulls, to magical snakes, to a tiny dog on the side of a deserted road, to starlings circling the evening sky in exhilarating formation.

Nina is a struggling writer, a college dropout, a liar, and a cheater. More than anything she wants love. She deserves it. From the burned-out suburbs of Florida to the anonymous squalor of New York City, she eats through an incestuous cast of characters in search of it: her mother, a narcissistic lesbian living in a nudist polycule; Odessa, a single mom with even worse taste in men than Nina; Seth, an artist whose latest show is comprised of three Tupperware containers full of trash; Brian, whose roller-coaster affair with Nina is the most stable "relationship" in his life; and more.

The old-fashioned struggle for fairness has finally been abandoned. It was a misguided endeavor. The world is divided into two groups, pats and quads. The pats may kill the quads as they like, and do. The quads have no recourse but to continue with their lives. The Divers’ Game is a thinly veiled description of our society, an extreme case that demonstrates a truth: we must change or our world will collapse. What is the effect of constant fear on a life, or on a culture?

Mildred Groves, an unusual young woman gifted and cursed with the ability to see the future, goes to work in a top-secret research facility during WWII, only to be tormented by visions of what the mission will mean for humankind.

Hayley always has a crush. The problem is, her crushes never like her back. After her latest unrequited love—a girl from her basketball team—gets a boyfriend, she decides she’s done falling for girls who are unavailable. Her best friend, Talia, wants romance too, but rarely gets crushes on anyone, and she’s tired of watching Hayley get her heart stomped on over and over. So the two girls make a pact: they’ll help each other find summer love by putting themselves in situations that always lead to romance in movies.

Cale Lambert, a bookish loner of mysterious parentage, lives in a dusty town near the California-Nevada border, a place where coyotes scavenge for backyard dogs and long-haul truckers scavenge for pills and girls. Cale was raised by her grandfather in a loving, if codependent, household, but as soon as she's left high school his health begins an agonizing decline. Set adrift for the first time, Cale starts waitressing at the local diner, where she reconnects with Penélope Reyes, a charismatic former classmate running mysterious side-hustles to fund her dreams.

One sexy fire captain. One Cajun chef. One combustible kitchen. When chef Colby Robicheaux returned home to New Orleans to save her family restaurant, the last person she expected to reconnect with was her brother's best friend and her childhood crush. As tempting as a sugar-coated beignet, Jason is one dish she can't afford to taste. Colby can't wait to leave the place where her distrust of love and commitment originated and go back to Vegas.

A haunted Aquarius finds love behind the veil. An ambitious Aries will do anything to stay in the spotlight. A foodie Taurus discovers the best eats in town (with a side of romance). A witchy Cancer stumbles into a curious meet-cute. Whether it’s romantic, platonic, familial, or something else you can’t quite define, love is the thing that connects us. All Signs Point to Yes will take you on a journey from your own backyard to the world beyond the living as it settles us among the stars for thirteen stories of love and life.