A trio of friends from New York City find themselves trapped inside a mechanical board game that they must dismantle in order to save themselves and generations of other children in this action-packed debut that’s a steampunk Jumanji with a Middle Eastern flair. Nothing can prepare you for The Gauntlet… It didn’t look dangerous, exactly. When twelve-year-old Farah first laid eyes on the old-fashioned board game, she thought it looked…elegant. It is made of wood, etched with exquisite images—a palace with domes and turrets, lattice-work windows that cast eerie shadows, a large spider—and at the very center of its cover, in broad letters, is written: The Gauntlet of Blood and Sand. The Gauntlet is more than a game, though. It is the most ancient, the most dangerous kind of magic. It holds worlds inside worlds. And it takes players as prisoners.

The explosive finale to Scholastic's mega-selling series. Throughout the hunt for the 39 Clues, Amy and Dan Cahill have uncovered history's greatest mysteries and their family's deadliest secrets. But are they ready to face the truth about the Cahills and the key to their unmatched power? After a whirlwind race that's taken them across five continents, Amy and Dan face the most the difficult challenge yet - a task no Cahill dared to imagine. When faced with a choice that could change the future of the world, can two kids succeed where 500 years worth of famous ancestors failed?

Roger Vadim directs this remake of his own 1956 film starring Rebecca de Mornay as a wilful woman determined to have a good time. After her exuberant and carefree nature lands her in jail, Robin Shea (de Mornay) is advised by the prison governor (Frank Langella) that marriage to a respectable man will win her freedom. She duly weds carpenter Billy Moran (Vincent Spano), a responsible family man who seems certain to have problems keeping his new bride in check. Robin sets about pursuing her dream of rock stardom with the accompanying reckless behaviour, but will Billy help her develop a new perspective on life?

Morgan the Wizard, Layla the Valkyrie, Korb the elven archer, Orlando the Warrior, and Phineas, Knight of the Order of Skye-adventurers all-must seek out and destroy the evil that is haunting the land of Viridus. In order to accomplish that, they need to gather up the four shards of the Gryphon Window, a mystical portal to the ethereal realm between the physical and the spirit worlds-that is where the great dark lord behind all their problems is hiding. But finding the shards won't be an easy task-not when the dark lord's minions are waiting in every shadow, behind every tree and stone, waiting to kill at their master's bidding!

On 3 October 1953, five young men crossed the border from Czechoslovakia into East Germany. Their mission was to deliver a secret message from a Czech general to US authorities before joining US troops and returning to liberate their country. What ensured was the largest manhunt of the Cold War.

Bringing social theory and philosophy to bear on popular movies, novels, myths, and fairy tales, The Gift and its Paradoxes explores the ambiguity of the gift: it is at once both a relation and a thing, alienable and inalienable, present and poison. Challenging the nature of giving as reciprocal, the book engages critically with the work of Mauss and develops a new theory of the gift according to which the gift cannot be reduced to a model of exchange, but must instead entail a loss or sacrifice. Ultimately, the gift is examined in the book as the impossible occurrence of gratuitous giving. In addition to exploring the conditions of possibility and impossibility of the gift, the book draws on the thought of figures such as Derrida, Serres, Simmel, Cixous, Irigaray and Heidegger to argue for the relevance of the phenomenon of the gift to broader issues in contemporary social sciences. It takes up questions concerning the constitution of community and the processes by which people are included in or excluded from it, gender relations, materiality, the economy, and the possibility that death itself could be a gift, in the form of euthanasia or self-sacrifice. A rigorous yet accessible examination of the phenomenon of the gift in relation to a range of contemporary concerns, The Gift and its Paradoxes will appeal to scholars and students within sociology, philosophy, anthropology, political theory and film and literature studies.

Plug back into the dangerous world of virtual gaming, in the next thrilling novel from the author of Arena. Kali Ling has faced down death hundreds of times for the entertainment of millions. She knows fear—and she knows what’s truly terrifying... There’s a new game in town. A brutal, winner-takes-all, international video game tournament showcasing the world’s most elite players, promising fame, prestige, and unbelievable fortune. But there’s a catch. The game uses new VR pods guaranteed to push digital warriors to their physical and psychological brink—adapting every time a gamer makes a move. As the first female captain and youngest team owner in VGL history, Kali is used to defying the odds. But as the all-star tournament heats up, her determination begins to waver and the pressures of media, sponsors, and the game itself begin to put cracks in her hard-set convictions—and strain on her relationship with the one person who matters most. If Kali and her teammates are to survive, they’ll have to find a way to be stronger than ever before. But battling the system may prove too difficult for even the most hardened of fighters...