The explosive international bestseller where history, romance, and the paranormal collide. A phone call from an old friend sets immortal book dealer Giovanni Vecchio back on the path of a mysterious manuscript he's hunted for over five hundred years. He never expected a young student librarian could be the key to unlock its secrets, nor could he have predicted the danger she would attract. Now he and Beatrice De Novo follow a twisted maze that leads from the archives of a university library, though the fires of Renaissance Florence, and toward a confrontation hundreds of years in the making. Elizabeth Hunter's books are delicious and addicting, like the best kind of chocolate. She hooked me from the first page, and her stories just keep getting better and better. Paranormal romance fans won't want to miss this exciting author! —Thea Harrison, NYT bestselling author Ms. Hunter's writing voice is simply addictive, and her ability to make you actually care about her characters is going to take her very far in the publishing world. —The Romanceaholic

After a chaotic marriage and a rough divorce, all Mira Hoskins wants is stability and normality. But when sexy Jack McAllister enters her life, she discovers that what you want isn't always what you need. Jack is a powerful witch with the ability to command fire and is anything but normal. As the head of a security detail for The Coven, a national organization that governs national witches, Jack has been assigned to watch over Mira. She is a natural born witch with the ability to call the air. And although she is unaware of her talent, a group of renegade witches has discovered her existence and are determined to steal her power--and her life.

Laurie Marks’ Elemental Logic series introduced readers to the realm of Shaftal, an intricately imagined land whose people operate within the boundaries of their basic natures—here defined as logics—which sometimes bequeath them with access to magical, elemental powers and sometimes embroil them in unsolvable internal conflicts. Fire Logic centers around the strong female character Zanja Na’Tarwein, a fighter and last survivor of her people in an occupied country. Alongside her is Karis, a powerful half-giant, who is a drug addict and lives in obscurity, hiding her considerable powers. Surrounded by incomprehensible loss, Zanja also forms a bond with Emil, an officer of the army she joins. Battling the complex forces of power, desire, and obligation, follow along as the trio work together to try and change the course of history.

Bachelard called them "the hormones of the imagination." Hegel observed that, "through the four elements we have the elevation of sensuous ideas into thought." Earth, air, fire, and water are explored as both philosophical ideas and environmental issues associated with their classical and perennial conceptions. David Macauley embarks upon a wide-ranging discussion of their initial appearance in ancient Greek thought as mythic forces or scientific principles to their recent reemergence within contemporary continental philosophy as a means for understanding landscape and language, poetry and place, the body and the body politic. In so doing, he shows the importance of elemental thinking for comprehending and responding to ecological problems. In tracing changing views of the four elements through the history of ideas, Macauley generates a new vocabulary for and a fresh vision of the environment while engaging the elemental world directly with reflections on their various manifestations.

Chelsea and Chad are twin elementals; humans born with the power to control and shape the elements. They, and many other elementals, are forced to hide their powers as many non-elementals fear them, especially fire-starters like Chelsea. The twins are only just learning true command of their powers, and what they can do. At university, Chelsea joins a fire-starter training course and trains hard to control the powerful flames that rage within her, often out of her control. She struggles to prove to herself that she can harness and control both her power and her mind. Meanwhile, Chad is a water-bringer who is honing his rare and deadly ability, but has placed himself under the authority of dangerous people who aim to use his powers for their own sinister agenda. When the two reunite, they are forced to choose sides. As tidal waves of power demolish entire cities, and bring the storm clouds of destruction to the Houston skyline, a war is coming . . . And it's time to find out where allegiances lie. Chelsea and Chad's decisions will forever change the world around them, so what will they choose?

For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world. The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation). Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.

Master storytellers Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson, the team behind Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits, collaborate again to create five captivating tales incorporating the element of fire. In McKinley?s ?First Flight,? a boy and his pet foogit unexpectedly take a dangerous ride on a dragon, and her ?Hellhound? stars a mysterious dog as a key player in an eerie graveyard showdown. Dickinson introduces a young man who must defeat the creature threatening his clan in ?Fireworm,? a slave who saves his village with a fiery magic spell in ?Salamander Man,? and a girl whose new friend, the guardian of a mystical bird, is much older than he appears in ?Phoenix.? With time periods ranging from prehistoric to present day, and settings as varied as a graveyard, a medieval marketplace and a dragon academy, these stories are sure to intrigue and delight the authors? longtime fans and newcomers alike.