"The Book and the Sword was Louis Cha's first novel, published in 1955. The story has a panoramic sweep which has at its heart a few unbeatable themes: secret societies, kung fu masters, and the sensational rumour so dear to Chinese hearts that the great Manchu Emperor Qian Long was not in fact a Manchu but a Han Chinese, a line of descent that came about as a result of a 'baby swap' on the part of the Chens of Haining in Southern China. It mixes in the exotic flavours of central Asia, a lost city in the desert guarded by wolf packs, and the Fragrant Princess. This lady is an embellishment of an actual historical figure - although whether she actually smelled of flowers, we will never know."--Jacket

Snatched by a dragon at the end of book one, Edmund and Elspeth awake to find themselves soaring over the frozen wastes of the Snowlands, hundreds of miles from home. Escaping the dragon's clutches, they are discovered in the soft snow by Fritha. a charcoal burner's daughter. Edmund wants her help to arrange a passage home, but Elspeth has other ideas. The sword is speaking to her, filling her thoughts more and more. It's destiny is nearby, the purpose for which is was hewn, and where the sword goes, Elspeth must follow, increasingly under it's spell. Edmund and Fritha refuse to let Elspeth travel alone, and so they set out together on a perlilous route to Eigg Loki, the mountain which is drawing Elspeth and the sword, and to the dark secrets which lie at its heart.

Rescued into another universe by the youngest of eight mage-brothers, world-weary Kelly Doyle finds herself exiled on an island where women are forbidden and surrounded by four sets of twin brothers who are struggling to avoid a curse. Reprint.

"Conor has believed he was being led to seize the high kingship. But now he learns that he has been shaped to be a tool in the hand of the true high king. Is he willing to sacrifice his life and his future to fulfill a prophecy that isn't his?"--

"Write, draw, and puzzle your way through [an] adventure story that is unique to every reader"--Publisher marketing.

The words of the Talmud were the universe for David Weiss Halivni during his childhood in Sighet, in the Carpathian Mountains. Before he was five he began his studies; by the time he was ten he had outgrown the town's teachers and started to learn at home with his scholarly, impoverished grandfather. Even before his ordination at the age of fifteen, in 1943, he was famous for his erudition. But when the Nazis crushed the Jewish community of the Carpathians in 1944, he closed his Talmud. Halivni taught in the concentration camps and risked his life to save a scrap of paper from a sacred book. But adherence to the fundamentalist worldview that insists on reconciling every apparent contradiction in the text - troubling to him even as a child - had become impossible for him now. When he arrived in New York after the war, he began struggling toward the "window" of secular learning. From that synthesis emerged his original approach to critical study of the Talmudic text not only in its modern, printed form but as it was in its original form, the Oral Torah from the mouths of countless sages. Painful, beautiful, and passionate, this memoir asks: What can the Holocaust mean for persons who have devoted their lives to the love of God? At the same time it is a unique look into the world of Talmudic learning, millennia old and still vibrant.