Want to be the next Andy Serkis as Gollum in Lord of the Rings? Or Zoe Saldana in Avatar? How about Seth MacFarlane in Ted? Or do you want to star in video games such as Fortnite, Call of Duty or Halo?If so, this book will tell you everything you need to know about acting for motion capture.This is the first book to provide an invaluable resource for the education of the next generation of performers in this exciting medium. Over...

A riveting story of talent and the price it exacts, set in a richly imagined Victorian EnglandCalled the most promising artist of his generation, handsome, modest, and affectionate, Richard Dadd rubbed shoulders with the great luminaries of the Victorian Age. He grew up along the Medway with Charles Dickens and studied at the Royal Academy Schools under the brilliant and eccentric J.M.W. Turner.Based on Dadd’s tragic true story, Mad Richard follows...

More adventures from one of Canada’s premier editors and storytellersCanada is a country rich in stories, and few take as much joy as Douglas Gibson in discovering them. As one of the country’s leading editors and publishers for 40 years, he coaxed modern classics out of some of Canada’s finest minds, and then took to telling his own stories in his first memoir, Stories About Storytellers.Gibson turned his memoir into a one-man stage show that even...

A sweeping, cinematic novel about the life of the Winter Queen, Elizabeth StuartOctober 1612. King James I is looking to expand England’s influence in Europe, especially among the Protestants. He invites Prince Frederic of the Palatinate to London and offers him his sixteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth’s hand in marriage. The fierce and intelligent Elizabeth moves to Heidelberg Castle, Frederic’s ancestral home, where she is favored with whatever she desires, and th...

In her stunning debut novel about a woman's journey to unravel the mystery of her parents' lives, Madeleine Thien proves herself a writer of vision, maturity, and style.Certainty follows Gail Lim, a producer of radio documentaries in Vancouver, as she works to uncover the history of her parents' relationship and struggles to come to terms with the events that brought them together. Gail's search for the truth leads her to Amsterdam where she meets a war ph...

From Man Booker Prize Finalist Ali Smith, Winter is the second novel in her Seasonal Quartet. This much-anticipated follow-up to Autumn is one of the Best Books of the Year from the New York Public Library.Winter. Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes.And now Art’s mother is seeing things. Come to think of it, Art’s seeing things himself.When four people, strangers and family, converge on a fifteen-bedroom house in Cornwall for Chri...

The award-winning author of The O'Briens and The Law of Dreams now gives us a devastating novel of love and family set in the violent years between 1914 and 1938 as Europe staggers between two world wars. Our narrator is Billy: born to a German father and Irish mother on the Isle of Wight summer estate of the German-Jewish Baron von Weinbrenner. This is the story of Billy and the baron's entrancing daughter, Karin, and the dangerous paths they travel as their childhood attachment deepens t...

Set against the construction of the Eiffel Tower, this novel charts the relationship between a young widow and an engineer who, despite constraints of class and wealth, fall in love.In February 1887, Caitriona Wallace and Émile Nouguier meet in a hot air balloon, floating high above Paris--a moment of pure possibility. But back on firm ground, their vastly different social strata become clear. Cait is a widow who because of her precarious financial situation is for...

Life in a Medieval City is the classic account of the year 1250 in the city of Troyes, in modern-day France. Acclaimed historians Frances and Joseph Gies focus on a high point of medieval civilization—before war and the Black Death ravaged Europe—providing a fascinating window into the sophistication of a period we too often dismiss as backward.Urban life in the Middle Ages revolved around the home, often a mixed-use dwelling for burghers with a store or workshop on the gr...

When a catastrophic solar storm brings about the collapse of modern civilization, an Amish community in Pennsylvania is caught up in the devastating aftermath. Once-bright skies are now dark. Planes have plummeted to the ground. The systems of modern life have crumbled. With their stocked larders and stores of supplies, the Amish are unaffected at first. But as the English (the Amish name for all non-Amish people) become more and more desperate, they begin to invade Amish farms, taking wha...

In December 1795, on the midnight stroke of her seventeenth birthday, Marie-Thérèse, the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, fled Paris’s notorious Temple Prison. Kept in solitary confinement after her parents’ brutal execution during the Terror, she had been unaware of the fate of her family, save the cries she heard of her young brother being tortured in an adjacent cell.She emerged to an uncertain future: an orphan, exile, and focus of political plots and mar...

An inside account of the fight to contain the world's deadliest diseases -- and the panic and corruption that make them worse.Throughout history, humankind's biggest killers have been infectious diseases: the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, and AIDS alone account for over one hundred million deaths. We ignore this reality most of the time, but when a new threat -- Ebola, SARS, Zika, coronavirus -- seems imminent, we send our best and bravest doctors to contain it. Pe...