This is an Apple Books audiobook narrated by a digital voice based on a human narrator.In a world where memory is fragile and truth lies buried beneath layers of time, one girl follows the echoes of a forgotten people.Beneath the mountains of Kaelith, Esha's people live by candlelight and ancient chants. They speak of the Sennari only in whispers — luminous beings who vanished when the world was still young. Their ruins lie silent, their wonders lost to dust… but something ...

‘Before we recorded Infernal Love, I didn’t know if I was coming or going. I developed quite a healthy drug habit and was drinking a bottle of Absolut vodka every day. I thought that if I gave up drinking, I’d spend the next two weeks lying in bed and feeling sick. I decided to keep going and see if inspiration would hit …’ Andy Cairns, Therapy?So Much For The 30 Year Plan is the first ever book to detail the life of Therapy?, one of rock’s boldes...

Tony Judt was born in London in 1948, but spent most of his career in America. He studied history at Cambridge and then earned his doctorate in France. His first major writings were about France’s historical left-wing movements, particularly the French Socialist Party. Judt started working on Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 in 1989 when he was employed by New York University. Published in 2005, it went on to win numerous honors; in 2006 it was shortlisted for the nonfiction Pulitze...

Winner of the 2023 Brian McConnell Book Award from the International Society for Contemporary Legend ResearchIn the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including the “Choking Doberman,” the “Eaten Ticket,” and the “Vanishing Hitchhiker.” But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or...

Few social historians had examined the popular religious beliefs of the 1500s at the time Thomas published Religion and the Decline of Magic in 1971. His analysis of how deeply held beliefs in witchcraft, spirits, and magic evolved during the Reformation remains one of the great works of post-war scholarship. Thomas concludes that belief in magic once served a purpose, helping people understand and cope with everyday problems. But scientific progress and religious change led to more ration...

Honourable mention for The American Folklore Society's Wayland D. Hand Prize for outstanding book combining historical and folkloristic methods and materials.Runner up for The Folklore Society's 2022 Katherine Briggs Award for most distinguished contribution to folklore studies.The little-studied and once much-feared boggart is a supernatural being from the north of England. Against the odds it survives today, both in place-names and in fan...

Tony Judt decided to write Postwar in 1989, the year the collapse of the Soviet Union provided European history with a rare example of a clearly-signposted ‘end of an era’.It's scarcely surprising, then, that the great virtue of Judt's book is the clarity and the breadth of its account of postwar Europe. His book coalesces around one central theme: the idea that the whole of the history of this period can be explained as an unravelling of the consequences of World War II. ...

In the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including "the Choking Doberman," "the Eaten Ticket," and "the Vanishing Hitchhiker." But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right.In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Leg...

Comprising three parts, this book is a companion volume to The Boggart: Folklore, History, Place-Names and Dialect. Part one, ‘Boggart Ephemera’, is a selection of about 40,000 words of nineteenth-century boggart writing (particularly material that is difficult to find in libraries). Part two presents a catalogue of ‘Boggart Names’ (place-names and personal names, totalling over 10,000 words). Finally, part three contains the entire ‘Boggart Census’ – a compendium of ground-breaki...

The game has begun, Hong Kong is the prize.Britain's surrender of Hong Kong to China has been set for 1997. But not everyone is happy. Russia, in particular, dreads the catastrophic upheavals strategic, economic and political that must follow.The KGB plot to ensure that China will inherit only a worthless shell, racked by social and financial instability. Pitted against them are the elite cadres of Chinese Intelligence the Mahjong Brigade. They need an insider, and their ...

A new supercomputer spells doom for TaiwanAmid the explosion of computer technology in the 1990s, nothing comes close to Apogee a software program able to process human speech in any language, paving the way for pilotless planes, driverless tanks and a global communications network limited only by human imagination.China, soon to resume control of Hong Kong, is now obsessed with an even greater prize in its long march to Pacific supremacy: Taiwan. The outcome is not in do...

The endgame beginsChina's supreme leader is at the point of death, and a complacent world yawns, convinced that the 'sleeping dragon' will never awake. But what if the world is wrong, and China has covertly managed to amass inconceivable military might?In Hong Kong, the financial and commercial giants have secretly arranged to leave before the Chinese takeover in 1997, their vast assets wired to safety by brilliant software codenamed The Scroll of Benevolence. Lo Bing, an...