For millennia, the passing seasons and their rhythms have marked our progress through the year. But what do they mean to us now that we lead increasingly atomized and urban lives and our weather becomes ever more unpredictable or extreme? Will it matter if we no longer hear, even notice, the first cuckoo call of spring or rejoice in the mellow fruits of harvest festival? How much will we lose if we can no longer find either refuge or reassurance in the greater natural—and meteorological—scheme of things? Nick Groom's splendidly rich and encyclopedic book is an unabashed celebration of the English seasons and the trove of strange folklore and often stranger fact they have accumulated over the centuries. Each season and its particular history are given their full due, and these chapters are interwoven with others on the calendar and how the year and months have come to be measured, on important dates and festivals such as Easter, May Day and, of course, Christmas, on that defining first cuckoo call, on national attitudes to weather, our seasonal relationship with the land and horticulture and much more. The author expresses the hope that his book will not prove an elegy: only time will tell.

The critically acclaimed, San Francisco Chronicle bestseller—a gripping story of the strife and tragedy that led to San Francisco’s ultimate rebirth and triumph. Salon founder David Talbot chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher from backwater city to thriving metropolis.

Captain Roland Warvold tells Alexa and Yipes about the adventures he shared with his brother Thomas in Elyon, before the wall went up and divided the world in two.

The Glamour is failing.With the passing of each season, this ancient natural protection between the worlds of Folk and the giant Fey, now threatens their destruction.But there are those who would exploit its weakness.When a Folk child is captured, her family set out on a desperate search to find her. A journey that will send them thousands of meadow-miles from home; from the woods of the Isle of Lands, to the splendour of the royal palace of Khartour and to the forbidding imperial court in Duzquen.They find treachery, bloodshed and battle and discover unlikely alliances, deepest friendships and true love.As the family race to be reunited, will the Glamour survive to protect them all for one more season?A quest to find a stolen child becomes a fight to save a world.

"The single most beautiful, solid, unearthly, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century ... a little golden miracle of a book." —Neal Gaiman Hope Mirrlees penned Lud-in-the-Mist--a classic fantasy, and her only fantasy novel--in 1926. When the town of Lud severs its ties to a Faerie land, an illegal trade in fairy fruit develops. But eating the fruit has horrible and wondrous effects. "Helen Hope Mirrlees was born in England in 1887. Mirrlees was a close friend of such literary lights as Walter de la Mare, T.S. Eliot, André Gide, Katharine Mansfield, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and William Butler Yeats. Under her own name, she published three novels: Madeleine— One of Life's Jansenists (1921); The Counterplot (1924); and her 1926 classic fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist, which has acknowledged inspiration to the likes of Neil Gaiman, Mary Gentle, Elizabeth Hand, Johanna Russ, and Tim Powers."--SF Site "Hope Mirrlees' writing, usually underrated, moves between gently crazy humour, poetic snatches, real menace, and real poignancy."—The Encyclopedia of Fantasy