In this book, fourteen mesmerizing fables - and the etchings they inspired - draw us back to our origins in a garden of sorrow and exile, death and renewal, beauty and melancholy. John Hughes re-imagines a series of fables in which Australian animals take on human qualities, as thief and actor, warrior and poet, farmer and merchant. These are reverse fables - in the way that the Antipodes reverse Northern Hemisphere logic - that cast us back to the flux at the beginning of the world: inchoate nature, the world in a state of formation, the garden, and the inferno. Accompanied by artist Marco Luccio's darkly wry etchings, this collaboration between two artists is as unique as the stories it contains.

Her world is in chaos. His world is in order. She wants to help the innocent. He wants to catch the guilty. But someone is trying to make sure that neither gets what they want. Alexis Gordon has spent the last year trying to get over the loss of her sister. Then she goes to work on a normal day...and reality as she knows it...disappears. Detective Kevin Sutherland, armed with his own psychic abilities, recognizes her gift and calls in his friend Stefan Kronos, a psychic artist and law enforcement consultant, to help her develop her skills. But Kevin has never seen anything like this case - a killer with a personal vendetta to stop Alexis from finding out more about him...and his long dead victims. The killer can be stopped. He must be stopped. But he's planning on surviving...even after death.

With the breadth and cumulative force of a novel, Mother of Sorrows presents ten interwoven stories of an American family starting out in the post—World War II suburbs of Washington, D.C., a world of identical brick houses and sunstruck, treeless lawns, a world of initial hopefulness from which shame and loss have seemingly been banished. This is the story of two adolescent brothers whose father has suddenly died, and of their beautiful and complicated mother, a mother whom the younger son worshipfully imagines as “Our Mother of the Sighs and Heartaches . . . Our Mother of the Gorgeous Gypsy Earrings . . . Our Mother of the Late Movies and the Cigarettes . . . Our Mother of Sudden Attentiveness . . . Our Mother of Sudden Anger.” This is the brother who narrates these tales as he looks back thirty years later, the only remaining survivor of a world he seeks both to leave behind and to preserve in words forever, a world of sorrow that has held him spellbound even as he has attempted to create a life of his own. Suffused with the beauty of Richard McCann’s extraordinary language, Mother of Sorrows introduces us to a voice that is urgent, contemplative, elegant, angry, revelatory, and like no other in contemporary fiction.

From National Book Award-winning author Walter Wangerin, Jr. comes the thought-provoking sequel to The Book of the Dun Cow, with new and revised content. “[A] profoundly imagined and beautifully stylized fable of the immemorial war between good and evil.” –The New York Times “A beautifully written fantasy anchored starkly in reality.” –The Washington Post Seeking peace and respite after their devastating battle with the Wyrm, Chauntecleer and his wife Pertelote again lead the animals of the Coop. But their quest is interrupted when Wyrm once again insinuates himself into the lives of the animals. To defeat this ancient evil for good, Chauntecleer will have to face Wyrm again, not on the battlefield, but deep within the serpent’s lair, risking his very soul to ensure the safety of the animals under his protection. “[A] fine book about the way evil enters the world, and this newly told story of Chaunticleer is one that details the loss of his innocence, of his love and of his God.” –The Houston Chronicle

From the bestselling author of Women Talking, a "wrenchingly honest, darkly funny novel" (Entertainment Weekly). Elf and Yoli are sisters. While on the surface Elfrieda's life is enviable (she's a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, and happily married) and Yolandi's a mess (she's divorced and broke, with two teenagers growing up too quickly), they are fiercely close-raised in a Mennonite household and sharing the hardship of Elf's desire to end her life. After Elf's latest attempt, Yoli must quickly determine how to keep her family from falling apart while facing a profound question: what do you do for a loved one who truly wants to die? All My Puny Sorrows is a deeply personal story that is as much comedy as it is tragedy, a goodbye grin from the friend who taught you how to live.

You’ve heard the story before: an orphaned boy, raised by a wise old man, comes to a fuller knowledge of his magic and uses it to fight the great evil threatening his world. But what if that hero were destined to become the new dark lord? The Academy of Chaenbalu has stood against magic for centuries. Hidden from the world, acting from the shadows, it trains its students to detect and retrieve magic artifacts, which it jealously guards from the misuse of others. Because magic is dangerous: something that heals can also harm, and a power that aids one person may destroy another. Of the academy’s many students, only the most skilled can become avatars—warrior thieves, capable of infiltrating the most heavily guarded vaults—and only the most determined can be trusted to resist the lure of magic. More than anything, Annev de Breth wants to become one of them. But Annev carries a secret. Unlike his classmates who were stolen as infants from the capital city, Annev was born in the village of Chaenbalu, was believed to be executed, and then unknowingly raised by his parents’ killers. Seventeen years later, he struggles with the burdens of a forbidden magic, a forgotten heritage, and a secret deformity. When Annev is subsequently caught between the warring ideologies of his priestly mentor and the Academy’s masters, he must finally decide whether to accept the truth of who he really is ... or embrace the darker truth of what he may one day become.