Who can Lena trust to help her find out the truth? Life in East Germany in the early 1980s is not easy for most people, but for Lena, it’s particularly hard. After the death of her parents in a factory explosion and time spent in a psychiatric hospital recovering from the trauma, she is sent to live with her stern aunt, a devoted member of the ruling Communist Party. Visits with her beloved Uncle Erich, a best-selling author, are her only respite. But one night, her uncle disappears without a trace. Gone also are all his belongings, his books, and even his birth records. Lena is desperate to know what happened to him, but it’s as if he never existed. The worst thing, however, is that she cannot discuss her uncle or her attempts to find him with anyone, not even her best friends. There are government spies everywhere. But Lena is unafraid and refuses to give up her search, regardless of the consequences. This searing novel about defiance, courage, and determination takes readers into the chilling world of a society ruled by autocratic despots, where nothing is what it seems.

KILLING EVE meets THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD A Cold War spy’s deceits rise through time to haunt his American son, in a dual narrative split between postwar Berlin and early twentieth century New York City. Past becomes prologue as a father’s secret life and untimely death begin to make treacherous sense before delivering one final surprise. Skilled and capable, Con Mathis works for the New York District Attorney’s office. He’s movie-star handsome, charming, well educated, haunted by his expat German father’s suicide, and devoted to his mother Ruth and sister Sophie. Having completed an undercover assignment investigating the Wall Street money laundering operation of a Russian kingpin, he unwinds at a Manhattan bar, drinks too much and meets Emmy, a compelling German woman he thinks could be his soul mate. The next day, hungover and foggy, he realizes that he lost his keys and wallet at her place and needs to go back, but he can’t remember exactly where she lives. By the time he finds her, the woman he felt so drawn to turns out to be unstable, even dangerous. Far from a stranger, Emmy is a missive from his late father’s Cold War past. In meeting Emmy, Con’s search for meaning in his father’s long ago suicide collides with his hidden life as a Stasi agent in Cold War Berlin. As the discoveries become more troubling, Con launches an investigation that inadvertently puts his beloved American mother and sister at risk.

The skeleton lay on its back. The jaws gaped and one arm lay across the chest as through flung there to ward off a blow . . . The Tangle is a long, narrow stretch of derelict land, a wilderness of weeds and rubbish with an old railway tunnel yawning blackly at one end. No-one - not even bullying Gary Deacon - dares venture far into its sooty darkness. But it is here that twelve-year-old Tan and his friends make a grisly discovery - a discovery that is to plunge them into a terrifying adventure as the tunnel slowly unfolds its sinister secret . . .

A riveting and powerful story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship and an indestructible love

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After her mother's mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season. Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate -- and gods and mortals -- are bound inseparably together.

Janet E. Aalfs was the poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts from 2003 to 2005. Her work weaves poetry and martial arts dance in performing, teaching, and social justice activism locally, nationally and internationally. Collections of her poems are Reach (Perugia Press, 1999), Full Open (Orogeny Press, 1996), and Of Angels and Survivors (Two Herons Press, 1992).Thomas Sayers Ellis, author of Skin Inc.: Identity Repair Poems (Graywolf Press, 2010), has this to say about Bird of a Thousand Eyes. "The author does not tease or play games with the poetic toolbox. She is creatively honest, lyric and imagistic, and always gathering ideas and redefining the corners of perception. There are many styles and poetic containers here, all governed by the integrity of various ways of breathingthese lines, nearly, pluck themselves. It's hard to poetically combine wisdom and experience without sounding like the know-it-all master of simile and metaphor, but Aalfs does so in stanzas that stay open long after they break or close."