From the author of City of Silver, a beautifully rich and puzzling historical mystery set in Paraguay, 1868 A war against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay has devastated Paraguay. Ninety percent of the males between the ages of eight and eighty have died in the conflict and food is scarce. In the small village of Santa Caterina, Padre Gregorio advises the women of his congregation to abandon the laws of the church and get pregnant by what men are available. As he leaves the pulpit, he discovers the murdered body of Ricardo Yotté, one of the most powerful men in the country, at the bottom of the belfry. There are many suspects: Eliza Lynch, a former Parisian courtesan who is now the consort of the brutal dictator, Francisco Solano López, and who entrusted to Yotté the country's treasury of gold and jewels; López himself, who may have suspected his ally Yotté of carrying on an affair with the beautiful Eliza; Comandante Luis Menenez, local representative of the dictator, who competed with Yotté for López's favor, and a wounded Brazilian soldier who has secretly taken up with one of the village girls. Lynch is desperate to recover the missing gold, and the comandante is desperate to prove his usefulness to López. To avoid having an innocent person dragged off to torture and death, a band of villagers undertake to solve the crime, including Padre Gregorio, the village midwife, her crippled husband returned from combat, their spirited daughter, and a war widow. Each carries secrets they seek to protect from the others, while they pursue their quest for the truth. Lyrical, complex, and meticulously researched, Annamaria Alfieri's Invisible Country is an ingenious cross between Isabel Allende and Agatha Christie.

A thoughtful analysis of how our world's borders came to be and why we may be emerging from a lengthy period of "cartographical stasis" What is a country? While certain basic criteria--borders, a government, and recognition from other countries--seem obvious, journalist Joshua Keating's book explores exceptions to these rules, including self-proclaimed countries such as Abkhazia, Kurdistan, and Somaliland, a Mohawk reservation straddling the U.S.-Canada border, and an island nation whose very existence is threatened by climate change. Through stories about these would-be countries' efforts at self-determination, as well as their respective challenges, Keating shows that there is no universal legal authority determining what a country is. He argues that although our current world map appears fairly static, economic, cultural, and environmental forces in the places he describes may spark change. Keating ably ties history to incisive and sympathetic observations drawn from his travels and personal interviews with residents, political leaders, and scholars in each of these "invisible countries."

When Europeans first settled in Australia, the land withheld many of its secrets from these new arrivals. There were broad rivers, wide plains, and tall forests, all of which to European eyes suggested promising sites for settlement. However, to many of the new settlers, the 'First Australians' (the Aboriginal people) were a puzzle. They moved freely through the country they knew intimately. What few settlers realized then was that the Aboriginal people and the land they lived in were indistinguishable. Invisible Country describes the environmental changes that have occurred in southwestern Australia since European settlement, through four case studies of the development of local rivers, forests, and coastal plains. These stories - compiled through extensive conversations with farmers, ecologists, traditional owners, and others who rely on the land - are book-ended by an examination of the historical perspective in which these changes have occurred. It is a reminder that the land owns the people, not the other way around, and this is the beginning of a conversation about understanding and caring for the land that all Australians are fortunate to live in. *** Librarians: ebook available Subject: Australian Studies, Environmental Studies, History]

In these nine extraordinary tales, acclaimed author Paul J. McAuley illuminates the unseen and the unimaginable with brilliant prose and incandescent conceptual daring. These stories explore the wonders and dangers of biotechnology and its and travel from a distant alternate past to a breathtaking far-flung future. in sixteenth century Venice, transformed by a premature Industrial Revolution, a physician mourning his daughter's passing meets a mountebank with the power to raise the dead. In a tomorrow of raw and terrible beauty, revolutionaries struggle to free genetically engineered creatures fated to die in combat games and violent sexual encounters. And ten million years in the future, on an artificial world orbiting an immense black hole, a civilization of awesome strangeness and complexity created -- and abandoned -- by God-like Preservers is about to meet the human ancestors of its makers. Enter "The Invisible Country" -- and prepare to be dazzled.

Stephan Wackwitz's family "never spoke about the fact that the scene of their childhood and the site of the century's greatest crime were separated by nothing more than a longish walk and barely a decade." With insight and wit, Wackwitz breaks this silence in 'An Invisible Country', a learned meditation on twentieth-century German history as viewed through the prism of one family's story. Writing of his grandfather (born in 1893), his father (1922), and himself (1952), Wackwitz places himself in the historical and emotional landscape of the 'invisible country' surrounding Anhalt in Upper Silesia, a town ten kilometres from Auschwitz, and the site of his grandfather's Lutheran pastorate from 1921 to 1933.

In this study, which is first of all a folk-lore study, we pursue principally an anthropo-psychological method of interpreting the Celtic belief in fairies, though we do not hesitate now and then to call in the aid of philology; and we make good use of the evidence offered by mythologies, religions, metaphysics, and physical sciences.

The Fairy-Folklore in Celtic Countries is a study by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, American anthropologist who studied Celtic mythology and folklore. He performed ethnographic fieldwork collecting fairy folklore in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, and the Isle of Man, and in this book he published his degree thesis. His goal was to elucidate the phenomenon of the Celtic belief in fairies. Some of the theories he came across are that the fairies were a cloistered race of dwarfs, that they are a product of our imagination, or that they are incorporeal spirits.