This alternate history fantasy by a Nebula Award nominee follows a young alchemist’s quest in Renaissance Italy under the wing of an archangel. Set against the turbulent backdrop of the Italian Renaissance, this alternate history takes place in a world where real faith‑based magic exists. Our hero is Damiano Dalstrego. He is a wizard’s son, an alchemist, and the heir to dark magics. But he is also an innocent, a young scholar and musician befriended by the Archangel Raphael, who instructs him in the lute. To save his beloved city from war, Damiano leaves his cloistered life and sets out on a pilgrimage, seeking the aid of the powerful sorceress Saara as he must walk the narrow path between light and shadow, accompanied only by his talking dog. But his road is filled with betrayal, disillusionment, and death, and Damiano is forced to confront his dark heritage, unleashing the hellish force of his awesome powers to protect those he loves. The further volumes of this tale are Damiano’s Lute and Raphael.

Guided by the Archangel Raphael, Damiano runs from his own demonic powers in this alternate Italian Renaissance of wizards, witches, and faith-based magic. This novel is a sequel to Damiano. Set against the turbulent backdrop of the Italian Renaissance, this alternate history takes place in a world where real faith-based magic exists. Our hero is Damiano Dalstrego. He is a wizard’s son, an alchemist and the heir to dark magics. Shattered by the demonic fury of his dark powers, Damiano Delstrego has forsaken his magical heritage to live as a mortal man. Accompanied only by the guidance of the Archnagel Raphael, the chidings of a brash young rogue, and the memory of a beautiful pagan witch, Damiano journeys across a plague-ridden French countryside in search of peace. But the Father of Lies reaches out once again to grasp him. And to save himself from the hellish destiny that awaits him, Damiano must challenge the greatest forces of darkness, armed only with the power of his love and the music of his lute. The final volume of this story is Raphael.

Her husband, who was thought to have died five years earlier, is still alive! Eden had never quite fit in with his famous family and she didn’t assert herself with him either—their marriage had been on the rocks. To make matters worse, after her husband’s disappearance a fake article about Eden having an affair appeared in a tabloid. Now they’ve been reunited and her husband is happy, but can their happiness last?

Aria is a world riddled with an epidemic. Two years have passed since the day strange monsters emerged from out of nowhere, paralyzing the otherwise peaceful lives of its citizens. Since then, few people dare to live outside the confines of the cities, fearing the dangers lurking beyond the protection of a mysterious army known as "the Knowms." Lucas Bardsson is one of the rare exceptions, valuing the privacy of rural living despite its inherent perils. Some might consider him reckless or perhaps even brave. For Lucas, however, this way of life has become little more than ordinary. But it all changes the day he stumbles across a peculiar object of unimaginable importance. Upon learning of its significance, he unwillingly becomes entangled in a series of events that alter his life, his character, and his world.

Of all the authors of Italy, there is surely none to whom both epithets might be applied more justly than to Giulio Carcano. His fecundity is almost as amazing as that of Lope de Vega in Portugal. His variety is greater. He wrote poetry and prose, fact and fiction, with equal facility, though with various degrees of feli city. But he never was dull and he was always lucid. And when he had no original work in hand he wreaked himself on translations. He was author, editor, critic, dramatist, orator, statesman. He was a member, actual or honorary, of every learned or literary society in Italy, and by virtue of his translation of Shakespeare - still accepted as their standard version by his countrymen was a vice-president of the English Shakespeare Society.

A transformative look at colonial women's pivotal roles as lenders and debtors in shaping the economic and legal systems of Newport and Boston. Winner of the Berkshire Women Historians Book Prize by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians In colonial Boston and Newport, personal credit relationships were a cornerstone of economic networks. During the eighteenth century, the pace of market exchange quickened and debt cases swelled the dockets of county courts, institutions that became ever more central to enforcing financial obligations. At the same time, seafaring and military service drew men away from home, some never to return. The absences of male household heads during this era of economic transition forced New Englanders to evaluate a pressing question: Who would establish and manage consequential financial relationships? In To Her Credit, Sara T. Damiano uncovers free women's centrality to the interrelated worlds of eighteenth-century finance and law. Focusing on everyday life in Boston, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island—two of the busiest port cities of this period—Damiano argues that colonial women's skilled labor actively facilitated the growth of Atlantic ports and their legal systems. Mining vast troves of court records, Damiano reveals that married and unmarried women of all social classes forged new paths through the complexities of credit and debt, stabilizing credit networks amid demographic and economic turmoil. In turn, urban women mobilized sophisticated skills and strategies as borrowers, lenders, litigants, and witnesses. Highlighting the often-unrecognized malleability of early American social hierarchies, the book shows how indebtedness intensified women's vulnerability, while acting as creditors, clients, or witnesses enabled women to exercise significant power over men. Yet by the late eighteenth century, class differentiation began to mark finance and the law as masculine realms, obscuring women's contributions to the very institutions they helped to create. The first book to systematically reconstruct the centrality of women's labor to eighteenth-century personal credit relationships, To Her Credit will be an eye-opening work for economic historians, legal historians, and anyone interested in the early history of New England.