NINE YEAR OLD Margot remembers the sun. "[A] yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy the world with . . . a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands." In Ray Bradbury's revered short story, "All Summer in a Day," the last time Margot saw the sun was when she was four years old and still living on Earth. After her family moved to Venus a year later, she longed to see the sun again and to feel its warmth on her skin. On the one day every seven years when it stops raining on Venus and the sun breaks through the perpetual cloud cover to brighten the landscape for a brief two hours, Margot is locked away in a dark closet by her jealous classmates. Readers familiar with the graceful and poetic writing of Ray Bradbury - and those new to his literary magic - will find themselves empathetic toward a young girl who is kept from feeling and seeing the sunlight by her mean-spirited peers. Jump forward in time and meet Margot at 16. In the story "When the Rain Stops," Jason Marchi provides one plausible and satisfying answer to the question left in readers' minds at the end of Bradbury's classic tale of aloneness - whatever happened to Margot?? Foreword by William F. Nolan, co-author of Logan's Run, one of the most seminal novels in the annals of science fiction.? Introduction by Dr. Jonathan R. Eller, Director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).? Discussions section for creative writing students.? Bonus letter from Bradbury to Marchi in March of 2002.

NINE YEAR OLD Margot remembers the sun. "[A] yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy the world with . . . a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands." In Ray Bradbury's revered short story, "All Summer in a Day," the last time Margot saw the sun was when she was four years old and still living on Earth. After her family moved to Venus a year later, she longed to see the sun again and to feel its warmth on her skin. On the one day every seven years when it stops raining on Venus and the sun breaks through the perpetual cloud cover to brighten the landscape for a brief two hours, Margot is locked away in a dark closet by her jealous classmates. Readers familiar with the graceful and poetic writing of Ray Bradbury - and those new to his literary magic - will find themselves empathetic toward a young girl who is kept from feeling and seeing the sunlight by her mean-spirited peers. Jump forward in time and meet Margot at 16. In the story "When the Rain Stops," Jason Marchi provides one plausible and satisfying answer to the question left in readers' minds at the end of Bradbury's classic tale of aloneness - whatever happened to Margot?

A full-throttle, fem-powered sci-fi actioner in the vein of Taken, Blade Runner and Riddick, from Alex James (The Pandora Sequence). Set against a bleak, morally-warped future dystopia, corporation employed secret agents battle for the galaxy's most sort after commodity, Ambrosia. White can’t remember her real name, or anything much about her real life – all she remembers is that slavers kidnapped her sister, the only thing she loves, and that that she has less than twelve hours to steal her back – or she will be lost forever in a lawless, immoral and barbaric moral vacuum of a galaxy where humanity has run rampant, limitless and uncontrolled, for centuries. Totally desperate, White has sold her body to the Celestia Corporation – receiving deadly skill and memory upgrades from Celestia’s most feared assassin – the cold sexual predator and emotionless psychopath known as Venus; a cruelly efficient, genetically engineered, galaxy-scale super-weapon in the body of a goddess. But even with these advantages, White knows that time is running out, and only the deep emotional bond with her sister will keep her going; White’s determination – and newfound brutality – cannot waver... even if it means leaving a devastating trail of death and wreckage in her wake, even if it means that what she finds at the end of her path of destruction – and what she has become – is more horrifying that anything she could have imagined...

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.