The great three-sided war continues: Rome against Persia against the tribes of the desert now commanded by Mohammed of Mekkah. But there is hope for the West. Prince Maxian, horrified at being the cause of so many deaths, has come to realize that the Oath need not be broken; it can be changed by a skilled sorcerer. (July)

What is a safe haven? What role should they play in an investment portfolio? Do we use them only to seek shelter until the passing of financial storms? Or are they something more? Contrary to everything we know from modern financial theory, can higher returns actually come as a result of lowering risk? In Safe Haven, hedge fund manager Mark Spitznagel—one of the top practitioners of safe haven investing and portfolio risk mitigation in the world—answers these questions and more. Investors who heed the message in this book will never look at risk mitigation the same way again.

Small states have learned in recent decades that capital accumulates where taxes are low; as a result, tax havens have increasingly competed for the attention of international investors with tax and regulatory concessions. Economically powerful countries including France, Britain, Japan, and the United States, however, wished to stanch the offshore flow of domestic taxable capital. Since 1998 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has attempted to impose common tax regulations on more than three dozen small states. In a fascinating book based on fieldwork and interviews in twenty-two countries in the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, J. C. Sharman shows how the struggle was decided in favor of the tax havens, which eventually avoided common regulation. No other book on tax havens is based on such extensive fieldwork, and no other author has had access to so many of the key decision makers who played roles in the conflict between onshore and offshore Sharman suggests that microstates succeeded in their struggle with great powers because of their astute deployment of reputation and effective rhetorical self-positioning. In effect, they persuaded a transnational audience that the OECD was being untrue to its own values by engaging in a hypocritical, bullying exercise inimical to free competition.

Eleven-year-old Danny O'Neill has never been what you'd call adventurous. But when he wakes the morning after a storm to find his house empty, his parents gone, and himself able to hear the thoughts of a dying tree, he has no choice but to set out to find answers. He soon learns that the enigmatic Book of Storms holds the key to what he seeks . . . but unraveling its mysteries won't be easy. If he wants to find his family, he'll have to face his worst fears and battle terrifyingly powerful enemies, including the demonic Sammael himself.In the beautifully imagined landscape of Ruth Hatfield's TheBook of Storms, magic seamlessly intertwines with the everyday, nothing is black and white, and Danny is in a race against time to rescue everything he holds dear.