While sitting in a London airport during a snowstorm, Lydia meets a Middle Eastern sheikh named Amir. She finds herself wanting him like she’s never wanted anyone before, and they end up spending a sultry, passionate night together. When they wake up the next morning, they’re informed that the airport will be closed for three days due to the bad weather. That’s when Amir offers Lydia three days and three nights with him. All she has to do is ask!

“A landmark work of lesbian fiction” and the basis for the acclaimed film Desert Hearts (The New York Times). Against the backdrop of Reno, Nevada, in the late 1950s, award-winning author Jane Rule chronicles a love affair between two women. When Desert of the Heart opens, Evelyn Hall is on a plane that will take her from her old life in Oakland, California, to Reno, where she plans to divorce her husband of sixteen years. A voluntary exile in a brave new world, she meets a woman who will change her life. Fifteen years younger, Ann Childs works as a change apron in a casino. Evelyn is instantly drawn to the fiercely independent Ann, and their friendship soon evolves into a romantic relationship. An English professor who had always led a conventional life, Evelyn suddenly finds all her beliefs about love, morality, and identity called into question. Peopled by a cast of unforgettable characters, this is a novel that dares to ask whether love between two women can last.

Princess Aliyah arrives to her wedding in a black wedding dress. This is a declaration of war to her husband, King Kamal. Seven years ago, the two were in a relationship, but he messed around with her and then left her. Now, the two of them end up in an arranged marriage, and she is being forced to give him an heir. Aliyah treats him coldly during the ceremony and that resistence awakens something within him. As the drums pronounce them husband and wife, Kamal takes Aliyah into the depths of the palace into his bedroom. Unable to hold himself back anymore, he rips off her black dress...

Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, this New York Times Notable Book presents a stunning reckoning with our current moment and with the literal and figurative end of time. Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time—the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun. In the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas’s neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks, and the apparent emptiness of the sky. Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present—unflinching, urgent—yet timeless and profound.

2012 Australian Romance Readers Awards Finalist: Favorite Historical RomanceCareer diplomat Alec Halsey has been elevated to a marquessate he doesn't want and Polite Society believes he doesn't deserve; his lover has decided she won't marry him after all and the suspicion he murdered his brother still lingers in London drawing rooms. So returning to London after seven months' seclusion may have been a mistake. Alec's foreboding deepens when a nobody vicar drops dead at a party-political dinner; he witnesses the very public humiliation of an up-and-coming portrait painter, and his rabble-rousing uncle Plantagenet is bashed and left for dead in a laneway. When the vicar's true identity is revealed, Alec suspects the man was poisoned. But who would want a seemingly harmless man of God murdered, and why?ALEC HALSEY MYSTERY series book 2Character-driven amateur sleuthNon explicit (mild violence)Story length 102,000 wordsREVIEWSLucinda Brant is the queen of Georgian Historical Mystery just as Georgette Heyer was the queen of Regency Romance. What these two authors have in common, besides being superb writers, is their ability to weave historical information into the plot so that the reader is transported effortlessly to another time and place. Lucinda Brant gets 5 stars from me, and I can't wait to read the other books in the Alec Halsey series! Anne B for Readers' FavoriteLucinda Brant has a beautiful writing style and a careful grasp on the social mores, political environment and tangled affairs of the aristocracy of Georgian England. Her characterizations are layered and complex. The mystery is intricately woven into an absorbing plot. Lucinda Brant is a gifted writer and Deadly Affair is highly and enthusiastically recommended for lovers of historical mysteries! Jill MacKenzie InD'Tale magazine

The final book in The Song of the Shattered Sands series closes the epic fantasy saga in a desert setting, filled with rich worldbuilding and pulse-pounding action. The plans of the desert gods are coming to fruition. Meryam, the deposed queen of Qaimir, hopes to raise the buried elder god, Ashael, an event that would bring ruin to the desert. Çeda and Emre sail for their ancestral home to bring the traitor, Hamid, to justice. To their horror, they discover that the desert tribes have united under Hamid's banner. Their plan? A holy crusade to annihilate Sharakhai, a thing long sought by many in the tribes. In Sharakhai, meanwhile, the blood mage, Davud, examines the strange gateway between worlds, hoping to find a way to close it. And King Ihsan hunts for Meryam, but always finds himself two steps behind. When Meryam raises Ashael, all know the end is near. Ashael means to journey to the land that was denied to him an age ago, no matter the cost to the desert. It now falls to Çeda and her unlikely assortment of allies to find a way to unite not only the desert tribes and the people of Sharakhai, but the city's invaders as well. Even if they do, stopping Ashael will cost them dearly, perhaps more than all are willing to pay.

In June 1960, a young faculty wife named Alzada Kistner and her husband David, a promising entomologist, left their 18-month old daughter in the care of relatives and began what was to be a four month scientific expedition in the Belgian Congo. Three weeks after their arrival, the country was gripped by a violent revolution trapping the Kistners in its midst. Despite having to find their way out of numerous life-threatening situations, the Kistners were not to be dissuaded. An emergency airlift by the United States Air Force brought them to safety in Kenya where they continued their field work. Thus began three decades of adventures in science. In An Affair with Africa, Alzada Kistner describes her family's African experience -- the five expeditions they took beginning with the trip to the Belgian Congo in 1960 and ending in 1972-73 with a nine-month excursion across southern Africa. From hunching over columns of ants for hours on end while seven months pregnant to eating dinner next to Idi Amin, Kistner provides a lively and humor-filled account of the human side of scientific discovery. Her wonderfully detailed stories clearly show why, despite hardship and danger -- and contrary to all of society's expectations -- she could not forsake accompanying her husband on his expeditions, and, to this day, continues to find the world "endlessly beckoning, a lively bubbling cauldron of questions and intrigue." In the spirit of Beryl Markham's West with the Night and Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, An Affair with Africa shares with readers the thoughts and experiences of a remarkable woman, one whose unquenchable thirst for adventure led her into a series of almost unimaginable situations. Readers -- from armchair travelers fascinated by stories of Africa to scientists familiar with the Kistners's work but unaware of the lengths to which they went to gather their data -- will find An Affair with Africa a rare treasure.