In what would be A.D. 600 in our history, the Roman Empire still stands, supported by the Legions and Thaumaturges of Rome. Now the Emperor of the West, the Augustus Galen Atreus, will come to the aid of the Emperor of the East, the Augustus Heraclius, to lift the siege of Constantinople and carry a great war to the very doorstep of the Shahanshah of Persia. It is a war that will be fought with armies both conventional and magical, with bright swords and the darkest necromancy. Against this richly detailed canvas of alternate history and military strategy, Thomas Harlan sets the intricate and moving stories of four people: Woven with rich detail youd expect from a first-rate historical novel, while through it runs yarns of magic and shimmering glamours that carry you deeply into your most fantastic dreams At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

MAGIC. MURDER. MAYHEM. But keep it in the family. Shine’s life is usually dull: an orphan without magic in a family of powerful mages, she’s left to run the family estate with only an eccentric aunt and telepathic cat for company. But when the family descend on the house for the annual Fertility Festival, Shine is plunged into intrigue; stolen letters, a fugitive spy and family drama mix with an unexpected murder, and Shine is forced to decide both her loyalties and future...

"George Black rediscovers the history and lore of one of the planet's most magnificent landscapes. Read Empire of Shadows, and you'll never think of our first—in many ways our greatest—national park in the same way again." —Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder Empire of Shadows is the epic story of the conquest of Yellowstone, a landscape uninhabited, inaccessible and shrouded in myth in the aftermath of the Civil War. In a radical reinterpretation of the nineteenth century West, George Black casts Yellowstone's creation as the culmination of three interwoven strands of history - the passion for exploration, the violence of the Indian Wars and the "civilizing" of the frontier - and charts its course through the lives of those who sought to lay bare its mysteries: Lt. Gustavus Cheyney Doane, a gifted but tormented cavalryman known as "the man who invented Wonderland"; the ambitious former vigilante leader Nathaniel Langford; scientist Ferdinand Hayden, who brought photographer William Henry Jackson and painter Thomas Moran to Yellowstone; and Gen. Phil Sheridan, Civil War hero and architect of the Indian Wars, who finally succeeded in having the new National Park placed under the protection of the US Cavalry. George Black1s Empire of Shadows is a groundbreaking historical account of the origins of America1s majestic national landmark.

Pitting fascists and communists in a showdown for supremacy, the Spanish Civil War has long been seen as a grim dress rehearsal for World War II. Francisco Franco’s Nationalists prevailed with German and Italian military assistance—a clear instance, it seemed, of like-minded regimes joining forces in the fight against global Bolshevism. In Hitler’s Shadow Empire Pierpaolo Barbieri revises this standard account of Axis intervention in the Spanish Civil War, arguing that economic ambitions—not ideology—drove Hitler’s Iberian intervention. The Nazis hoped to establish an economic empire in Europe, and in Spain they tested the tactics intended for future subject territories. “The Spanish Civil War is among the 20th-century military conflicts about which the most continues to be published...Hitler’s Shadow Empire is one of few recent studies offering fresh information, specifically describing German trade in the Franco-controlled zone. While it is typically assumed that Nazi Germany, like Stalinist Russia, became involved in the Spanish Civil War for ideological reasons, Pierpaolo Barbieri, an economic analyst, shows that the motives of the two main powers were quite different. —Stephen Schwartz, Weekly Standard

Shadows of Empire explores Javanese shadow theater as a staging area for negotiations between colonial power and indigenous traditions. Charting the shifting boundaries between myth and history in Javanese Mahabharata and Ramayana tales, Laurie J. Sears reveals what happens when these stories move from village performances and palace manuscripts into colonial texts and nationalist journals and, most recently, comic books and novels. Historical, anthropological, and literary in its method and insight, this work offers a dramatic reassessment of both Javanese literary/theatrical production and Dutch scholarship on Southeast Asia. Though Javanese shadow theater (wayang) has existed for hundreds of years, our knowledge of its history, performance practice, and role in Javanese society only begins with Dutch documentation and interpretation in the nineteenth century. Analyzing the Mahabharata and Ramayana tales in relation to court poetry, Islamic faith, Dutch scholarship, and nationalist journals, Sears shows how the shadow theater as we know it today must be understood as a hybrid of Javanese and Dutch ideas and interests, inseparable from a particular colonial moment. In doing so, she contributes to a re-envisioning of European histories that acknowledges the influence of Asian, African, and New World cultures on European thought--and to a rewriting of colonial and postcolonial Javanese histories that questions the boundaries and content of history and story, myth and allegory, colonialism and culture. Shadows of Empire will appeal not only to specialists in Javanese culture and historians of Indonesia, but also to a wide range of scholars in the areas of performance and literature, anthropology, Southeast Asian studies, and postcolonial studies.

The Guild of Navigators has ruled the Aion Sea for centuries, using their fleet of mystical ships to collect trade for the Aurelian Empire.Now the Emperor is dead.For Calder Marten, Captain of The Testament, the Emperor's death is not an end, but an opportunity. He and his crew seek the legendary Heart of Nakothi, an artifact that could raise a second Emperor...and earn Calder a fortune.But they're not the only ones who want the Heart.The Consultant's Guild, an ancient order of spies and assassins, will stop at nothing to keep the world in chaos. They seek to destroy the Heart, and prevent the world from uniting under a single Emperor ever again.On the seas, a man works to restore the dying Empire.In the shadows, a woman seeks to destroy it.Will you explore the seas here with Calder? Or will you walk the shadows with Shera, in the parallel novel "Of Shadow and Sea"?

A sweeping "Wild-West" Fantasy Epic full of magic, mystery, and adventure! Salitore Amazd is an imperial adjudicator, an enforcer of the law and keeper of the peace across the vast, desert stretches of the Indrim Empire's southern reaches known as the Outlands. For Sali, the job means long days in the saddle, constant travel, and hours of rugged, wilderness beauty far from the intrigue and politicking of the empire's core. Until a trainload of convicted prisoners, led by a noble named Nirren, vanishes from a high-security engine in an unprecedented escape, leaving behind only bodies, confused survivors, and a public letter accusing Sali of being a co-conspirator ... as well as a fellow idealist in their forthcoming revolution. An accusation with no evidence, but more than enough to turn the public eye of the empire in his direction. Now forcibly partnered with Meelo Karn, a member of the imperial inquisition with her own ties to the convicts, it's up to both of them to track down Nirren and his gang before they engulf the Outlands in a political firestorm that burns it to the ground. Be it wild animals, unfriendly locals, or even encounters with the enigmatic, steam-driven Grey Knights ... Sali and Meelo have a call to deliver justice. And justice will be done.