Peter Markham is a schoolteacher who has been abandoned by his female partner because she, rightly, considers him dull. He tries to change himself, seeking adventure by joining a course at a gliding club. Disappointed, he leaves the airfield in anger when a wild teenage girl forces him to stop, begging for help in retrieving her older stepsister, Julia, who has landed her glider in a hayfield a hundred kilometres away. He allows himself to be manipulated by Mitch, the younger girl, calling her a cunning little minx. Reluctantly, he does as she asks. This is the beginning of a series of life-changing experiences for him. Instructed by the older sister, he learns to fly, finds himself in love with the sport and with young Mitch, while confronting serious problems with Julia. Tragedy intervenes, but happier prospects emerge.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea. “The perfect novel ... Freshly mysterious.” —The Washington Post Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis's billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call. In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!

Picture, if you can, a world without glass. There would be no microscopes or telescopes, no sciences of microbiology or astronomy. People with poor vision would grope in the shadows, and planes, cars, and even electricity probably wouldn't exist. Artists would draw without the benefit of three-dimensional perspective, and ships would still be steered by what stars navigators could see through the naked eye. In Glass: A World History, Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin tell the fascinating story of how glass has revolutionized the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Starting ten thousand years ago with its invention in the Near East, Macfarlane and Martin trace the history of glass and its uses from the ancient civilizations of India, China, and Rome through western Europe during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution, and finally up to the present day. The authors argue that glass played a key role not just in transforming humanity's relationship with the natural world, but also in the divergent courses of Eastern and Western civilizations. While all the societies that used glass first focused on its beauty in jewelry and other ornaments, and some later made it into bottles and other containers, only western Europeans further developed the use of glass for precise optics, mirrors, and windows. These technological innovations in glass, in turn, provided the foundations for European domination of the world in the several centuries following the Scientific Revolution. Clear, compelling, and quite provocative, Glass is an amazing biography of an equally amazing subject, a subject that has been central to every aspect of human history, from art and science to technology and medicine.

A sumptuously illustrated history of the Titanic, her sinking and its aftermath.

On October 28, 1943, a U.S. Navy ship was successfully teleported with disastrous effects on its crew. Crewmen died, developed rare or yet unidentified diseases, and most horrifying of all, some became fused to the metal, their arms and legs protruding from the bulkhead. A team of psychologists has gathered at a small university to study and analyze the same reoccurring dream of seven completely different people. The dream involves a large navy ship in a vast desert with soldiers trapped inside the bulkheads. Slowly, by depriving the dreamers of REM sleep, the dreams are killing the dreamers. What the dreamers do not realize is that another vessel; this one equipped with nuclear missiles has disappeared in a green-gray mist over the North Atlantic. Only Elizabeth Foxworth, a social worker studying the dreamers, can prevent nuclear disaster by entering the dream, and risking her life and the lives of the dreamers. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.