Escaping from Midrash was not easy, even riding on the back of a dragon. Seeger promised his friend Boyd he would return with help to set him and the other child soldiers free from the brutality of the Midrashi. What he does not know is that it will nearly be a year before he finally returns, across the desert, with an army and five dragons. But what will he find after all this time? Can the Midrashi be defeated? And what has become of Boyd and the other children?

With the help of her animal friends, Daine fights to save the kingdom of Tortall from ambitious mortals and dangerous immortals.

The Tale of Alathimble Spaide is a collection of fantasy tales and poems to amuse and delight. The book includes tales of wizards, gnomes, ogres, trolls, vampires and one dragon who isn’t all that he appears to be. The main character of the title work is a hapless magician and his pet pig who together, through shared misfortune and ineptitude, become unlikely heroes. For the reader searching for deep and serious high fantasy, we strongly recommend Tolkien. For those simply looking for a bit of frivolous fantastical fun, this is the book for you.

Keenley Turnshoe is a young apprentice cleric living in Utoptia, a medieval-like fantasy world of magic and monsters. But unknown to Keenley and the other inhabitants of Utopia, their world is also the virtually rendered plaything of a very wealthy and self-absorbed young man named Jeff, AKA the Great God Avatar. When Jeff’s ‘answering machine’, the Deus Interface, decides that it is the Great God Avatar, it identifies Jeff as a threat and strands him in his own virtual world. Jeff seeks help from Keenley and his companions as he tries to return to his virtual throne room. As they risk their lives on a quest to find the Great God, will they discover the true identity of their difficult travelling companion? And will the Deus Interface be able to locate and destroy them before they fulfil their quest?

Bernard Crowley and his sister Inch are ordinary, elderly magicians, barely making ends meet, especially since the Northern Church began to declare so many different types of magic to be heretical. Their friend Closer is even worse o . e price of magic materials keeps going up, and the poor man can hardly keep his magical wheelchair in operation. Their Destinies are changed one Midwinter when they experiment with various charms, a mirror, and a book called Giddens of Happenstance. A Kildareen wizard called Lucy Wilde begins to pursue the artifact they have inadvertently created, and even more mysterious forces work to change the shape of their whole lives. Will they be able to prevent their discovery from falling into the wrong hands?

“There’s a dragon watching me when I wake up.” As the Death Lord’s daughter, seventeen-year old Uriel is comfortable walking the lavender-scented tunnels of death. She’s not pleased to be dragged back to the living realm of Meldin. It’s a world of laser-edged swords and shape-changing dragons, where the Lord of the World has sworn to kill her father. Uriel needs a place to hide and, with a fortune-telling dragon, four scrying cards she drew in death, and the son of her father’s enemy, she believes she’s found one. Until the rumours start …

Shakespeare at best answers the needs of a particular generation in one country or another. Those needs vary: directors and actors, audiences and common readers, scholar-teachers and students do not necessarily seek the same aids for understanding. Shakespeare is an international possession, transcending nations, languages and professions. More than the Bible, which competes with the Koran, and with Indian and Chinese religious writings, Shakespeare is unique in the world’s culture, not just in the world’s theatres. Shakespeare’s literary and cultural authority is now so unquestioned that it has taken on an aura of historical inevitability and has enshrined the figure of the solitary author as the standard bearer of literary production. It is all the more important, then, to suggest that Shakespeare had a genius for timing—managing to be born in exactly the right place and at the right time to nourish his particular form of greatness. He regularly demonstrates and celebrates the ideas and ideals of Renaissance humanism, often—even in his tragic plays—presenting characters that embody the principles and ideals of Renaissance humanism, or people of tremendous self-knowledge and wit that are capable of self-expression and the practice of individual freedom. Shakespeare himself can be understood as the ultimate product of Renaissance humanism; he was an artist who openly practised and celebrated with a deep understanding of humanity and an uncanny ability for self-expression.