NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of the Vampire Chronicles, the first installation of her spellbinding Mayfair Chronicles—the inspiration for the hit television series! “Extraordinary . . . Anne Rice offers more than just a story; she creates myth.”—The Washington Post Book World Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him. As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, an intricate tale of evil unfolds. Moving through time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the Louis XIV’s France, and from the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, The Witching Hour is a luminous, deeply enchanting novel. The magic of the Mayfairs continues: THE WITCHING HOUR • LASHER • TALTOS

An enchanting, hypnotic trilogy of witchcraft, adventure, and romance from the beloved author of Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, The Mayfair Witches is a wondrous journey through the centuries, across the globe, and between the human and demonic worlds. Now all three novels in Anne Rice’s spellbinding series have been collected for the first time in this stunning eBook bundle: THE WITCHING HOUR LASHER TALTOS On the screened porch of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking. She belongs to a legendary dynasty of witches—a family that is itself haunted over the ages by a dangerous and seductive being named Lasher. Their story begins in our time, with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a brilliant neurosurgeon aware of her abilities but oblivious to her ancient line, finds the drowned body of Michael Curry off the coast of California and brings him to life. In his brief interval of death, he has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him. Fiercely drawn to each other, Rowan and Michael set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, and an intricate tale of evil unfolds: an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn. Praise for Anne Rice and The Mayfair Witches “Behind all the velvet drapes and the gossamer winding sheets, this is an old-fashioned family saga. . . . Rice’s descriptive writing is so opulent that it almost begs to be read [by] candlelight.”—The Washington Post Book World “[A] huge and sprawling tale of horror.”—The New York Times Book Review “Lush prose, dense atmosphere, steamy sex, Gothic tension . . . Rice stages her scenes in a wide variety of times and locales, tapping deeply into the richest veins of mythology and history.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Spellbinding . . . mythical . . . Rice is a pure storyteller.”—Cosmopolitan “Rice sees things on a grand scale. . . . There is a wide-screen historical sweep to the tale as it moves from one generation of witches to the other.”—The Boston Globe “An intricate, stunning imagination.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “It is hard to praise sufficiently the originality of Miss Rice. . . . She has made a masterpiece of the morbid, worthy of Poe’s daughter.”—The Wall Street Journal

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of the Vampire Chronicles, the second installation of her spellbinding Mayfair Chronicles—the inspiration for the hit television series! “[Anne] Rice’s descriptive writing is so opulent it almost begs to be read by candlelight.”—The Washington Post Book World In seventeenth-century Scotland, the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjured up the spirit she named Lasher—a creation that spelled her own destruction and torments each of her descendants. Now, the beautiful Rowan Mayfair, queen of the coven, must flee from this darkly brutal yet irresistible demon. The magic of the Mayfairs continues: THE WITCHING HOUR • LASHER • TALTOS

In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time

Originally published 1969-1972 in single magazine form as The witching hour #1-19.

Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award One of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists From the acclaimed author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, and Peaces There’s something strange about the Silver family house in the closed-off town of Dover, England. Grand and cavernous with hidden passages and buried secrets, it’s been home to four generations of Silver women—Anna, Jennifer, Lily, and now Miranda, who has lived in the house with her twin brother, Eliot, ever since their father converted it to a bed-and-breakfast. The Silver women have always had a strong connection, a pull over one another that reaches across time and space, and when Lily, Miranda’s mother, passes away suddenly while on a trip abroad, Miranda begins suffering strange ailments. An eating disorder starves her. She begins hearing voices. When she brings a friend home, Dover’s hostility toward outsiders physically manifests within the four walls of the Silver house, and the lives of everyone inside are irrevocably changed. At once an unforgettable mystery and a meditation on race, nationality, and family legacies, White is for Witching is a boldly original, terrifying, and elegant novel by a prodigious talent.

Most people know Roald Dahl as a famous writer of children's books and adult short stories, but few are aware of his fascination with medicine. Right from his earliest days to the end of his life, Dahl was intrigued by what doctors do, and why they do it. During his lifetime, he and his family suffered some terrible medical tragedies: Dahl nearly died when his fighter plane went down in World War II; his son had severe brain injury in an accident; and his daughter died of measles infection of the brain. But he also had some medical triumphs: he dragged himself back to health after the plane crash, despite a skull fracture, back injuries, and blindness; he was responsible for inventing a medical device (the Wade-Dahl-Till valve) to treat his son's hydrocephalus (water on the brain), and he taught his first wife Patricia to talk again after a devastating stroke. His medical interactions clearly influenced some of his writing - for example the explosive potions in George's Marvellous Medicine. And sometimes his writing impacted on events in his life - for example the research on neuroanatomy he did for his short story William and Mary later helped him design the valve for treating hydrocephalus. In this unique book, Professor Tom Solomon, who looked after Dahl towards the end of his life, examines Dahl's fascination with medicine. Taking examples from Dahl's life, and illustrated with excerpts from his writing, the book uses Dahl's medical interactions as a starting point to explore some extraordinary areas of medical science. Solomon is an award-winning science communicator, and he effortlessly explains the medical concepts underpinning the stories, in language that everyone can understand. The book is also peppered with anecdotes from Dahl''s late night hospital discussions with Solomon, which give new insights into this remarkable man's thinking as his life came to an end.