Showing results for "F" in Metaphysical & Visionary

Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy, guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the comfort he wants to believe he brings to the dead, his relationships with his fellow Vessels are distant at best, leaving him reliant on his AI implant for companionship.

Connie’s life is a mystery, her background unknown, her future uncertain. Driven by desperation, she uses her powers to investigate crimes. If she can’t unravel her own past, she’ll seek justice for others. A chance encounter, a brace of poisoned partridges, and Connie is knee deep in trouble again. Her story is slowly unraveling, the truth almost within reach. If only she could remember.

"I very much need to be dead." These are the chilling words left behind by a man who had everything to live for - but took his own life. In the aftermath, his widow, Jane Hawk, does what all her grief, fear, and fury demand: find the truth, no matter what. People of talent and accomplishment, people admired and happy and sound of mind, have been committing suicide in surprising numbers. When Jane seeks to learn why, she becomes the most-wanted fugitive in America. Her powerful enemies are protecting a secret so important - so terrifying - that they will exterminate anyone in their way.

Episcopal bishop Timothy Archer is haunted by the suicides of his son and mistress, and must cope with the implications of the discovery of a religious artefact. These events drive him into a quest for the identity of Christ. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is Philip K. Dick's last completed novel and a learned, moving investigation of the paradoxes of belief.

Earth is trapped in the crossfire of an unwinnable war between two alien civilizations. Its leader is perpetually on the verge of death. And on top of that, a new drug has just entered circulation—a drug that haphazardly sends its users traveling through time. In an attempt to escape his doomed marriage, Dr. Eric Sweetscent becomes caught up in all of it. But he has questions: Is Earth on the right side of the war? Is he supposed to heal Earth's leader or keep him sick? And can he change the harrowing future that the drug has shown him?

Pre-empting novels such as the Booker Prize-winning "Time’s Arrow" by as much as 20 years, Counter-Clock World is a story of racial tensions told against the background of the year 1998, in which time flows in reverse as people are born old only to grow younger and younger.

Louis Rosen and his partners sell people—ingeniously designed, historically authentic simulacra of personages such as Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. The problem is that the only prospective buyer is a rapacious billionaire whose plans for the simulacra could land Louis in jail. Then there's the added complication that someone—or something—like Abraham Lincoln may not want to be sold.

In this wry, paranoid vision of the future, overpopulation has turned cities into crammed industrial anthills. For those sick of this dystopian reality, one corporation, Trails of Hoffman, Inc., promises an alternative: Take a teleport to Whale's Mouth, a colonized planet billed as the supreme paradise. The only catch is that you can never come back.

In Grudova's unforgettably surreal style, these stories expose the absurdities behind contemporary ideas of work, Britishness and art-making, to conjure a singular, startling strangeness that proves the deft skill of a writer at the top of her game.

On the rural coast of Puglia, Italy, Becca and Ric run the Bastion, offering solace and a home for lost souls. Each year they welcome new members to join the Open Feast, where they teach them to release their burdens and create a better world, in a journey of self-discovery and spiritual teachings. But the Bastion has secrets. The Bastion has a destiny. Deep in the Inner Pinewood, a place of real magic and beauty, they are all that stands against the dark forces that would tear the sky wide open.

This is the compelling story of two women, born centuries apart, and the ancestral legacy that binds them. Ella Turner tries hard to fit into the small, close-knit community of the French town that she has moved to. She even changes her name back to Tournier, and knocks the rust off her high-school French. However, isolated and lonely, she is drawn to investigate her Tournier ancestry, with heart-wrenching results.

Yielding to a compulsion he can't explain, Ted Barton interrupts his vacation in order to visit the town of his birth, Millgate, Virginia. But upon entering the sleepy, isolated little hamlet, Ted is distraught to find that the place bears no resemblance to the one he left behind—and never did. He also discovers that in this version of Millgate, Ted Barton died of scarlet fever when he was nine years old. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that it is literally impossible to escape.

When Holly applies for a job at the Paradise—one of the city's oldest cinemas, squashed into the ground floor of a block of flats—she thinks it will be like any other shift work. She cleans toilets, sweeps popcorn, avoids the belligerent old owner, Iris, and is ignored by her aloof but tight-knit colleagues who seem as much a part of the building as its fraying carpets and endless dirt. Dreadful, lonely weeks pass while she longs for their approval, a silent voyeur.

Time's Arrow tells the story, backwards, of the life of Nazi war criminal, Doctor Tod T. Friendly. He dies and then feels better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home.

Sarah Jane Pullman is a good cop with a complicated past. From her small-town chicken-farming roots through her runaway adolescence, court-ordered army stint, ill-advised marriage and years slinging scrambled eggs over greasy spoon griddles, Sarah Jane unfolds her life story, a parable about memory, atonement, and finding shape in chaos. Her life takes an unexpected turn when she finds herself named the de facto sheriff of a rural town, investigating the mysterious disappearance of the sheriff whose shoes she's filling.