A multimillion-copy bestseller in China—now available in English! In this heart-pounding adventure, a group of individuals who have come together for an expedition, each with a specific interest, soon find themselves motivated by one common goal: the sheer will to survive. THE QUEST: To find the lost city of Jingjue, a once-glorious kingdom, along with the burial chamber of its mysterious queen. Both lie buried under the golden dunes of the desert, where fierce sandstorms and blazing heat show no mercy. THE TEAM: Teenagers Tianyi, who has the ability read the earth and sky through feng shui, and Kai, Tianyi’s best friend and confidant; Julie, a wealthy American whose father vanished on the same trek a year ago; Professor Chen, who wants to fulfill a lifelong dream; and Asat Amat, a local guide gifted in desert survival. THE OBSTACLES: Lethal creatures of the desert and an evil force that wants to entomb the explorers under the unforgiving sands of China’s Taklimakan Desert forever. Translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang, whose recent work includes NEVER GROW UP, the translation from Chinese of the autobiography from action movie superstar Jackie Chan.

Today, the ancient Roman towns of Leptis Magana and Sabratha on the Mediterranean cost of Libya attract only a few curious travelers. But two thousand years ago they were thriving commercial and agricultural centers whose value to Rome was measured by the wealth of produce shipped annually to the cities of the Empire. This volume is primarily an introduction to the personality of these two towns, recovered by archaeologists from the burying sands only in relatively recent years. The text offers a concise and informative survey of the history of the history of the region known as Tripolitania and examines the cultural and social life of Leptis Magna and Sabratha as reflected in the magnificent ruins depicted in the accompanying plates. The first chapter provides an understanding of Roman government and organization in Africa from the time of Scipio’s destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. until the beginning of Mohammedan rule in 698 A.D. This discussion gives perspective to the life of Leptis Magna and Sabratha by placing it in context with Roman Africa in general, explaining the various political divisions of the Roman provinces as well as the manner of civil and military administration under early imperial Roman, Vandal, and Byzantine rule. The second and third chapters deal, respectively, with the particular ruins of the two towns. Although both Leptis Magana and Sabratha (unlike their sister city Oea, or modern Tripoli) succumbed to the smothering weight of drifting sand dunes, they are made to live again in the pages of this volume. Kenneth Matthews’ text is an excellent summary of life in Roman times, while the photographs by Alfred Cook provide views, unsurpassed in beauty and clarity of detail, of the buildings and art that once flourished along the rim of the Mediterranean Sea.

Maria Golia focuses on the present moment of Cairo, one of the world's most illustrious and irreducible cities.

The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes. Here in this land of howling wind and infernal sand, four siblings find themselves scattered and lost. Their father was a sand diver, one of the elite few who could travel deep beneath the desert floor and bring up the relics and scraps that keep their people alive. But their father is gone. And the world he left behind might be next. Welcome to the world of Sand, a novel by New York Times best-selling author Hugh Howey. Sand is an exploration of lawlessness, the tale of a land ignored. Here is a people left to fend for themselves. Adjust your ker and take a last, deep breath before you enter.

Spell-binding evocation of Bedouin life in the 1930s when oil is discovered by Americans in an unnamed Persian Gulf kingdom.

Berlin: long-celebrated as a city of artists and outcasts, but also a city of teachers and construction workers. A place of tourists and refugees, and the memories of those exiled and expelled. A city named after marshland; if you dig a hole, you'll soon hit sand. The stories of Berlin are the stories Built on Sand. A wooden town, laid waste by the Thirty Years War that became the metropolis by the Spree that spread out and swallowed villages whole. The city of Rosa Luxemburg and Joseph Roth, of student movements and punks on both sides of the Wall. A place still bearing the scars of National Socialism and the divided city that emerged from the wreckage of war. Built on Sand. centres on the personal geographies of place, and how memory and history live on in the individual and collective imagination. Stories of landscapes and a city both real and imagined; stories of exile and trauma, mythology and folklore; of how the past shapes and distorts our understanding of the present in an age of individualism, gentrification and the rising threat of nativism and far-right populism. Together, these stories offer a portrait of a city three decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the legacy of that history in a city that was once divided but remains fractured and fragmented.