Marcea of the Dust finds our heroine, Marcea, walking a fine moral line between the emotional trauma of her childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father and her response to other young women, whom she stumbles across accidentally in the sex trade of Mexico. Marcea's actions challenge the lives of those around her, especially those of Collo and Drayson, her loving, fearless stepparents. Seeking refuge with nine young female victims of the sex trade, she turns to her stepparent...

My plan was perfect…My friend needed a date. And my brother’s best friend was single. Problem solved.Until I saw Jaeger for the first time in years, and sparks flew in the wrong direction.Jaeger has grown up and bulked up. But that shouldn’t matter, because I have the perfect life. Really.Only my plans are beginning to unravel and now visions of Jaeger's hard abs, broad shoulders, and intense green eyes fill my head.I should hold back in cas...

It tells the story of the Baltimore Gun Club, a post-American Civil War society of weapons enthusiasts, and their attempts to build an enormous Columbiad space gun and launch three people—the Gun Club's president, his Philadelphian armor-making rival, and a French poet—in a projectile with the goal of a Moon landing.

The story begins with strange lights and sounds, including blaring trumpet music, reported in the skies all over the world. The events are capped by the mysterious appearance of black flags with gold suns atop tall historic landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty in New York, the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. These events are all the work of the mysterious Robur (the specific epithet for the English oak (Quercus robur) and figuratively taken to mea...

Set in the summer of 1903, a series of unexplained events occur across the Eastern United States, caused by objects moving with such great speed that they are nearly invisible. The first-person narrator John Strock, 'Head inspector in the federal police department' in Washington, DC, travels to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to investigate. He discovers that all the phenomena are being caused by Robur, a brilliant inventor. (He was previously featured as a character in Verne's ...

In the wake of war, the Baltimore Gun Club becomes a roaring satire of martial vanity, its members measuring glory by the size of their cannons and the scale of destruction they can devise. When peace leaves these "Exterminating Angels" idle, their frustration turns to restless invention—until President Impey Barbicane, coldly brilliant and utterly practical, unveils a scheme so audacious it transforms boredom into global excitement: fire a cannonball to the moon. Verne turns the impossibl...

In the steaming heart of the Upper Amazon, a cryptogram and a hard-eyed adventurer set Jules Verne's The Giant Raft in motion. Torres, a "captain of the woods" with a shady past, lives by hunting fugitive slaves and by seizing any chance for profit, and when he deciphers a document that seems to promise leverage over a wealthy man, greed quickly turns to thoughts of blackmail and betrayal. But the secret he values most is snatched away by a guariba monkey, launching a frantic chase through...

Off-limits never looked so tempting.Levi Cade’s firefighting career burned up after an accident on the job. Then is father died and left him in charge of the family’s multimillion-dollar resort. Now he’s forced to work with financially uptight advisors telling him what to do, and he needs someone he can trust at his side.The perfect candidate walks through the door in a pencil skirt, fitted white blouse, and a mass of wavy blond hair she tries to contain.

The Child of the Cavern is an adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, part of his Voyages Extraordinaires series, reproduced here from its Standard Ebooks edition.The Child of the Cavern follows engineer James Starr as he receives a letter from an old friend and co-worker, Simon Ford, requesting that he revisit a depleted coal mine in Scotland that he used to manage. Upon arriving, Starr finds the entire Ford family living in the mine, and Ford explains that a new coal ve...

An ex-slave trader named Torres comes across a secret encrypted note and schemes to figure out what it means. Meanwhile, Joam Garral, who runs a farm in Peru near the source of the Amazon river and is an outlaw from Brazil, accedes to his daughter's wishes to get married to her love at the mouth of the Amazon. They decide to travel down the Amazon with the entire family and servants in a giant raft, encountering many adventures on the way.21st in the Voyages Extraordinaires series,...

Hulda, the daughter of an innkeeper in the Norwegian countryside, is engaged to Ole, a fisherman. When Ole fails to return, Hulda fears him dead, until she receives a message that he has scribbled on the back of a lottery ticket. Newspapers broadcast the story, fueling excitement and speculation ahead of the lottery drawing.The novel, based in part on Verne's travel through Scandinavia in 1861, belongs to the collection Voyages Extraordinaires, which contains some of his best-known...

Lieutenant Hobson is an officer employed by the Hudson's Bay Company, tasked with the mission of traveling to the Arctic Circle and building an outpost there in order to collect valuable furs.After a long voyage, the Lieutenant and his party settle on a small peninsula and build a modest fort. Though initially successful, the colony soon finds itself in grave danger when an earthquake severs their settlement from the mainland.Written during a period in which the fur trade w...