Divided under the sun, United against the darkness For General Sato, a sentinel of Samas, adherence to the Path comes as naturally as breathing. Honor and duty are the pillars of his life. When a new breed of bandit, more cunning and dangerous than ever before, threatens his home, he finds that all his honor counts for little. The giant known only as Beast, without family or people, is on the brink of achieving his life’s work. He’s never known fear or defeat, but an enemy approaches unlike any he has met before. For the first time in his life, Beast will question whether his strength is enough to save him. Young Shin lives contentedly as a cog beneath the notice of the system she serves. When that system finally turns its back on her, she must find the will and courage to survive in a new, terrifying world. Over all, a shadow gathers its forces. It seeks to engulf Samas, the nation blessed by the eternal sun, in a darkness from which there is no escape.

The realisation that the universe is not 13.8 billion years old, but only 599 million years, brings with it the uncomfortable knowledge that it will all end next Sunday. Ambrose, a Bard living on a Dyson Ring rotating around the last eternal Sun, sets off on a quest to save the universe and remake humanity. But reality is not what it appears, and changes with each new revelation.

A new Path must be forged in the blood of heroes. General Sato is not the sentinel he once was. Confronted with the brutal realities of his order, he wrestles with his faith in the Path. Now, with the Maraman threat tainting the soil of Samas, Sato must decide if he should break from the Path for good or cling tightly to the tenets he's followed since he was a child. Abandoning Samas, Beast sailed in search of a simpler life where fighting for his own freedom was all that mattered. Now, commanding a juggernaut, one question bothers him most of all: What good is a warrior without a fight? The sentinels Shin hated now serve alongside the sin under her command. Her extraordinary aptitude for sacrifice has become her greatest source of shame. The one constant in her life is Corin, but even he knows she can’t hide from sacrifice forever. The Maraman emperor has arrived, and Shin might be the only one who can stop him. As Samas enters its darkest hour, the heroes it needs are farther away than ever. To survive, they must find a new way forward, a new Path, forged from the blood of the warriors of sun and moon.

Lucy Sinclair’s debut will be a parade of everything opulent Edwardian London society has to offer. Most importantly, it will be nothing like her older sister’s dangerous experience—especially if her overprotective brother-in-law, Lord Thornewood, has his way. As if screening her dance partners isn’t enough, Thornewood insists that his brother, James, train Lucy in self-defense. She wouldn’t mind so much if her treacherous mind didn’t continue to replay the kiss they once shared. But awkward defense lessons are the least of her problems. Her arcana, a magical talent that allows her to mentally enter any scene that she draws, grows stronger by the day. Again and again Lucy is compelled to draw a portal to her mother’s realm of Sylvania—and with each stroke of her pen, she risks attracting the attention of the Order of the Eternal Sun, the sinister brotherhood that steals the power of Sylvani blood for their own dark ends. When a bold new suitor arrives from India, Lucy can’t help but be intrigued—though her family questions his mysterious past. But as Lucy’s own suspicions grow, and the threat of the Order looms larger, Lucy will have to learn to harness her unpredictable power or risk falling under the Order’s shadow forever.

The years of political and social despair in France-from the great depression through the Nazi occupation, Resistance, and liberation, to the Algerian War-forced French intellectuals to rethink the values of their culture. Their faltering attempts to break out of a psychological impasse are the subject of this thoughtful and compassionate book by a distinguished American historian. In this first treatment of contemporary French thought to bridge philosophy, literature, and social science and to show its relation to comparable thinking in Germany, Britain, and the United States. Hughes also assesses the work of other writers in terms of their emotional biography and role in society.Hughes found those who struggled to find meaning and purpose amid chaos to be among the most brilliant minds of their century. They included the social historians Bloch and Febvre; the Catholic philosophers Maritain and Marcel; the proponents of heroism Martin du Gard, Bernanos, Saint-Exupery, Malraux, and DeGaulle; and the phenomenologists Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. They also included the strangely assorted trio of Camus, Teilhard de Chardin, and Levi-Strauss, who showed the way to a wider cultural community. Yet in nearly every case these scholars achieved something quite different from what they set out to do. For this self-questioning generation, the interchange between history and anthropology became most compelling and of greatest interest to the world outside.The Obstructed Path blends H. Stuart Hughes' concern for the many ways in which historians define and practice their craft, his lifelong interest in literature, his fascination with the influence of Marx and Freud, and his empathy with the varieties of Christian thought. It also demonstrates his delicate grasp of singular personalities such as Bernanos, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and Levi-Strauss. His profound insight into the flaws of many elaborate philosophical constructions, and into t