The Chaotic Love Life of a Woman Named HannahLet me say something about Hannah My girl is a winner, real winner. She has that career, independence, lifestyle everyone wants — no strings, no messes, no nonsense. Her life is inexplicably perfect on every front,right on time. Why? She does that to it.Hannah is very intelligent and quick, two thoughts ahead of everyone else, efficient and never lets feelings hinder her progress. She was results orientated, no t...

Voltaire's weapons of choice? Satire, wit, and absurdity.His target? The Church and State.His goal? Nothing short of enlightenment.In this exciting new edition, WordFire Press presents A Voltaire Triptych: Micromegas, Plato's Dream, and Candide, compiled and edited by Carrie Christopher. With a compelling foreword from Arthur C. Clarke award-winning writer and British scholar Adam Roberts, readers will gain new insights into Voltaire's writings.In Micromegas...

From his fiction set in the world of Middle-earth to his influential scholarship on Beowulf and fairy stories, J. R. R. Tolkien is the father of fantasy literature.Tropes, character-types and his own personal history have inspired the fantasy genre for generations but the sheer size of his legendarium and the studies surrounding his work are monumental. Using a lively A-Z structure, Adam Roberts provides 26 essays that offer stimulating fresh takes and eng...

Brussels 1969: Oskar Lenkeit is a fish out of water at the EEC.He's about to find out how far. Echoes from the past are threatening to disturb the three-year-old truce between France and Germany over the direction of the EEC. At the request of some unlikely sponsors, Lenkeit takes on an Internal Affairs investigation intended to restore the peace, but ends up with a foot on either side of a widening rift.With corruption at the pinnacle of European society, can the project s...

****WINNER** The British Science Fiction Association Best Non-Fiction 2020Are we doomed? Is an almighty power or an earth-shattering meteor waiting for us just around the corner?**In this thought-provoking book, Professor Adam Roberts explores our many different cultural visions of the end of the world - likely and unlikely, mundane and bizarre - and what they say about how we see ourselves and our societies. What is it is that we are really afraid of? An uncaring universe;...

In Middlemarch, George Eliot draws a character passionately absorbed by abstruse allusion and obscure epigraphs. Casaubon’s obsession is a cautionary tale, but Adam Roberts nonetheless sees in him an invitation to take Eliot’s use of epigraphy and allusion seriously, and this book is an attempt to do just that.Roberts considers the epigraph as a mirror that refracts the meaning of a text, and that thus carries important resonances for the way Eliot’s novels generate their meanings....

The definition and understanding of "terrorism" is in a state of unprecedented evolution. No longer are acts of terrorism rare and far-flung. Following the horrendous attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, U.S. citizens have had their eyes opened to a new world where this nightmare stalks the daily news and is never far from consciousness.Attacking Terrorism brings together some of the world's finest experts, people who have made the study of this rising menac...

Brussels, 1970: Oskar Lenkeit has been enthralled by the darling of the Berlaymont, right from the first day he met her.But for reasons of his own, he bitterly hates her too.As if life isn’t complicated enough, he has to work out why a wartime Italian special forces commander is in cahoots with the Mafia. And then get the East German Stasi to do something about it.'The author has depicted with great care the atmosphere in the Italy of the "Years of Lead" ' - Jérôme

An interstellar craft is decelerating after its century-long voyage. Its destination is V538 Aurigae ?, a now-empty planet dominated by one gigantic megastructure, a conical mountain of such height that its summit is high above the atmosphere. The ship's crew of five hope to discover how the long-departed builders made such a colossal thing, and why: a space elevator? a temple? a work of art? Its resemblance to the mountain of purgatory lead the crew to call this world Dante.In our...

Dublin, 1970: Oskar Lenkeit is a man on a mission, or rather two missions.The East German Stasi want to know why the Irish government have changed their minds about arming the IRA. The French want to know too - just in case they might want to pick up where Jack Lynch’s government left off.Thankfully, for the sake of Cold War peace, each side thinks it should be Lenkeit’s employer, the EEC, which takes the blame if he gets found out.But when Lenkeit gets to Ireland h...

The story of the EEC and the EU, up to 2009, told in the allegorical style of Animal Farm."As a higher animal, he knew it was his duty not to tax the brains of the lower animals with thoughts which would be too complex for them, and only cause distress." - Sunflower the Goat"She had sought to make economies in the farm's outgoings wherever possible, cutting the milk ration to the younger animals and even going to the extent of selling Korolsky's family silver." - Duchess th...

The Palladian style dominated British architecture for most of the 1700s, until the rise of the Adam style, which held sway for the final decades of the eighteenth century. Brothers Robert and James Adam were almost single-handedly responsible for infusing Georgian architecture with the sensibilities and elements of classical Hellenic and Latinate design. Their elegant, sophisticated form of Neoclassicism affected not only architecture, but also interior design, furniture design, and lands...