Showing results for "blake rowan"

What if the freedom you've been chasing isn't out there-beyond the next goal, gadget, or dopamine hit-but in learning to want just enough? In a world wired for overload, this groundbreaking book offers a modern antidote to endless desire and digital excess.More than a critique of the attention economy or a guide to digital minimalism, this is a deeply human invitation to reclaim your time, your focus, and your sense of meaning. Drawing from ancient philosophy, systems thinking, and...

Mitchell has always lived in a world of too much input. The grit of dust in his socks, the relentless thwack of his pack against his spine, the smell of sun-baked heather... each sensation is a data point demanding attention. His mind craves order, predictability, and silence.He finds it in a mountain tarn, a perfect, silent oval of teal water cradled in stone. The cold water wraps around him like a sensory vacuum, finally allowing his brain to stop processing the noise of the worl...

Title: The Wine HarvestSubtitle: A Ritual of Fire and FruitThe village is starving. For three years the wine has died in the vats, and the harvest withers.William is the blacksmith's apprentice, his hands scarred by the forge and his future measured in horseshoes and plough blades. Alice is the Magistrate's daughter, raised on silk, parchment, and the cold calculation of political marriage. They have never spoken. T...

Gillian Simms is a lead biomaterials engineer with a sharp mind, a sharper email style, and a body she has spent years hiding behind lab coats. Patrick Coats is a systems integration analyst who communicates in code and treats human interaction like a bug to be fixed. They have never met in person, only clashed across seven months of hostile email threads.A catastrophic failure of their prototype spacesuit threatens a £350 million ESA contract. With no time to hire a test pilot, th...

Martha Bexley is the daughter of a master goldsmith, heir to a workshop she cannot legally own. James Castle is her father's senior journeyman, newly elevated to Master... but without the capital to buy a shop or the raw gold for a royal commission.Together, they are a perfect equation. Separately, they are ruined.The contract marriage is one of cold logic: shared profits, separate beds, and a clear boundary between the forge and the bedchamber. For four weeks, the arrangem...

The heat is a physical weight. Marcus can smell hot asphalt, sun‑baked pine, and the sharp, living salt of a body working hard. He likes it. It means he's alive.Eliot rolls in behind him, flushed and fierce. She's a climbing specialist, all lean muscle and lung capacity, and the only rider who can match his pace. Between them, they've won more club races than the rest combined. They're not a couple. Just rivals. Just teammates.But when a freak hailstorm traps them on a remo...

Bram is tired of being called a robot. He is methodical, literal, and easily overwhelmed by the chaos of modern dating. He craves clarity, predictability, and a partner who doesn't treat his need for structure as a flaw.After yet another failed match‑app conversation ends with him being blocked, he posts a desperate question on a neurodivergent forum: Is it unreasonable to want a highly organised, scheduled approach to intimacy?The answer arrives as a spreadsheet.

In a valley where land is law and the surplus are discarded, Elspeth wears the charcoal chevron of the unlanded... a mark of disposability. She is twenty-two, invisible, and measured by the bushels of barley she does not own. Joshua is twenty-three, an apprentice cooper who has spent six years believing that his brutal labour would buy him a workshop, a future, and the girl he promised to marry behind the tithe‑barn.When a city fraud steals his inheritance, Joshua makes a choice: d...

Sixteen thousand square kilometres of unmapped forest. Two contestants. Zero clothing. Zero tools. Zero mercy.Welcome to the Naked Gauntlet, the world's most brutal reality show. For forty‑eight hours, Matt and Hannah are hunted by autonomous Hunter drones while millions watch. The prize is top tier Citizenship and one hundred million credits. The cost could be everything.Matt is a constructor who thinks in foundations and load‑bearing walls. Hannah is a data analy...

The Cold Horizon was a research vessel, a metal box carrying thirty-two souls through the dark nebula. When the primary containment field failed, the ship sheared apart in seconds.Junior spectral analyst Dr Thalia Roux and systems pilot Rhys Calder escaped in a single Kestrel escape pod, stripped of everything but each other.The pod's fuel was insufficient for their mass. To survive, they had to shed every kilogram... deck plates, insulation, rations, clothing, eve...

The Severn bends, and the war has come to the waterside. Four troopers of the New Model Army are billeted at the ferry house, and a lone woman cannot hold the latch against the wolves.Margaret of the Crossing is no town lady. She hauls barges, cracks drovers' crowns with her mallet, and has kept her father's house running through fever and frost. But when the billet‑master marks her home for four horse‑soldiers, she needs a shield. She needs a husband... or the likeness of one....

The Tartarus‑9 is a fourteen‑thousand‑ton nuclear crawler, grinding through the abyssal mud of the Clarion‑Clipperton Zone. Frank Galloway and Jo Mercer are its pilots... seasoned, isolated, and bound by a five‑year professional partnership that has never crossed the line.When a catastrophic landslide crushes the starboard auxiliary pod, they are forced to share the primary immersion tank, completely naked, their minds linked through a fragile neural bridge. The only way to drive t...