Adolescence is a bitch! However, there are rules to help the gifted school child.

Only monsters summon fire by magic. It's a sin against the sun god and a crime against the king. The punishment is death. But when sixteen-year-old Mina discovers fire magic runs in her family's blood, it's just the beginning of the secrets her father has been keeping from her. When her father is murdered, this half-starved peasant girl finds herself on the run--pursued across the desert by the soldiers and guards of the noble Houses. To survive, she knows she'll have to abandon her past and learn the way of the sword. But only boys are allowed to carry a blade. There's only one solution... Disguised as a young nobleman, Mina must make a new life for herself in the heart of her enemies. But she knows she can't keep up the masquerade forever. With time running out, which will she choose to find--the truth or revenge?

"Not all of the poems in this book are directly about dance, but they have all been influenced by my deepest inner sense of the rhythm, pattern and movement in life, with its constant changes and surprises. All of life is moving and our relationship to all living things on earth is how we sense eternity." Inspired by her teachers and the people she happened to meet, including people like dancer Ivor Meggido and publisher Brenda Walker, dancer, teacher, actor and writer Wendy Wright has been writing poetry for many years. This is a selection of her enlightening work centred on her life and meditations on all facets of that life.

The story of an encounter between a young and introverted gay man, Paul, and his Nemesis, a frail old soldier locked in reminiscences about his days in the British Army of India, Mr Fox. The story is narrated by Paul now aged 72 and begins gloomily, but lightens into a humorous reaction to the follies of British Indian occupation. Paul and Mr Fox meet in an NHS hospital in London, the young man afflicted by Tropical Sprue and the old soldier dying of bowel cancer. The young man is a closet gay and troubled by things of the flesh, by appearances, by missed opportunities and by adolescent certainties and yet doubts. Mr Fox is an extrovert who shares his outrageous preferences and undoubted racism with all and sundry. As a farrier sergeant he was undoubtedly expert for he was attached to General Dunsterville's troops of 'moral camouflage", the precursor of the SAS. Paul gradually becomes very much aware of his own empirical racism and British Empire mentality - which he finally embraces in the style of Mr Fox.

“An astonishingly beautiful book. The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation.”—Harper’s “Through the sweat and haze of longing come piercing insights – about the closeness of gay male friendship, about the vanity and imperfections of men. The more one reads the novel, we realise that what Holleran has given us is our very own queer (queerer?) Great Gatsby: its decadence, its fear, its violence, its ecstasy, its transience.”—The Guardian Andrew Holleran’s landmark novel of a young man's search for love and companionship in New York’s emerging gay world in the 1970s, with a new introduction by Garth Greenwell. Young, astonishingly beautiful, and tired of living a lie, Anthony Malone trades life as a seemingly straight small-town lawyer for the decadence of New York’s emerging gay scene—an odyssey that takes him from Manhattan’s Everard baths and after hour discos, to lavish orgies on Fire Island and parks after dark. Rescuing Malone from a possessive lover and shepherding him through his immersion in this life of fierce joys and cheap truths is the flamboyant Sutherland, a high-camp quintessential queen. But for Malone, the endless city nights and Fire Island days are close to burning out, and despite Sutherland’s abundant attentiveness and glittering world-weary wisdom, Malone soon realizes what he is truly looking for may not be found in these beautiful places, where life is crowded, and people are forever outrunning their own desires and death.

From individual grains to desert dunes, from the bottom of the sea to the landscapes of Mars, and from billions of years in the past to the future, this is the extraordinary story of one of nature's humblest, most powerful, and most ubiquitous materials. Told by a geologist with a novelist's sense of language and narrative, Sand examines the science—sand forensics, the physics of granular materials, sedimentology, paleontology and archaeology, planetary exploration—and at the same time explores the rich human context of sand. Interwoven with tales of artists, mathematicians, explorers, and even a vampire, the story of sand is an epic of environmental construction and destruction, an adventure in staggering scales of time and distance, yet a tale that encompasses the ordinary and everyday. Sand, in fact, is all around us—it has made possible our computers, buildings and windows, toothpaste, cosmetics, and paper, and it has played dramatic roles in human history, commerce, and imagination. In this luminous, kinetic, revelatory account, we do indeed find the world in a grain of sand.