Despite the enormous literature on the crusades, the Frankish states in the Aegean (set up in the wake of the Fourth Crusade in 1204) have been seriously neglected by modern historians. Yet their history is both compelling in itself - these were the last crusader states to be set up in the eastern Mediterranean and among the last to fall to the Turks - and also valuable for the case study they offer in medieval colonialism. Peter Lock surveys the social, economic, religious and cultural as...

Billy and Jilly Watson ask Mikkee the Martian to explain the Bermuda Triangle.Mikkee replies that it started when an alien spaceship crashed on Earth millions of years ago.Signals between the Aliens and their home planet cause interruptions in the sea and air in the surrounding area, and ships and planes caught in the disturbance, are trapped in a time bubble,Mikkee takes the twins to visit one such bubble, where their ship is raided by pirates and they are taken ca...

"The Greatest Love of All" is a powerful, deeply contemplative book about a journey with God. A compilation of intense Christian poetry and Catholic apologetics. Moving, inspiring love sonnets to God, Christmas poems that will put you in the manger with the Holy Family and Passion poems that will make you feel like you were standing at the foot of the Cross on the first Good Friday. There are also great, unanswerable questions for God. Atheists don't believe in God's existence at all; but ...

Set in the ‘90s, this lyrical autobiographical novel follows the relationship that develops between a recent college grad and a young widow during their nightly swims in Lake Michigan“[A] mosaic of uncanny photographs and rediscovered diaries, fresh correspondence between ex-lovers, meditations on childhood and parenthood, an amphibious dance between the past and the present”—Karen Russell“Swimming at night, to compare its slipperiness ...

**“Electric.” —Vanity Fair“The characters that inhabit The Bewildered are cut from a rare cloth of eccentricity. Or make that electricity . . . Compelling.” —San Francisco Chronicle“Rock has an eye for detail, with lucid, confident metaphors reminiscent of Annie Proulx.” —The Wall Street Journal**In Portland, Orgeon, three high school friends—Leon, Chris and Kayla—spend their time skateboarding, studying foreign languages and clas...

This Is the Place is the sinister tale of an aged and lonely blackjack dealer living in Wendover, Nevada, and his love that leads him to do a terrible thing, and the story he tells to justify it to himselfSixty-four-feet tall and made of metal, the neon giant Wendover Will stands in front of the Stateline casino in Wendover, Nevada and faces east. The sign under him reads "This Is The Place." Over a hundred miles away in Utah, across the salt flats, stands...

Vivian feels left behind when her older sister, Audra, runs away from home. She believes that Audra will return and pays careful attention to the clues around her. Then, inexplicably, writing begins to appear in a blank notebook.When Audra does come back for Vivian, she's in the company of a strange man. The three of them run away together and practice wilderness survival. While Audra plans for the future, Vivian continues to gather evidence: Who is this mysterious man, and does he ...

A father and his estranged daughter reconnect to try to understand a decades-old trauma in this haunting novel, part ghost story, part lyrical exploration of family, aging, and how we remember the past.At age 11, Helen disappeared in the wilderness of Mount Rainier National Park while camping with her father, Benjamin. She was gone for almost a week before being discovered and returned to her family. It is now 25 years later, and after more than two decades of estr...

A father and his estranged daughter reconnect to try to understand a decades-old trauma in this haunting novel, part ghost story, part lyrical exploration of family, aging, and how we remember the past.At age eleven, Helen disappeared in the wilderness of Mount Rainier National Park while camping with her father, Benjamin. She was gone for almost a week before being discovered and returned to her family. It is now twenty-five years later, and after more than two de...

Populated by strangers, ghosts, and other shadowy figures, the thirteen stories in The Unsettling attend to those startling moments when what we have understood as familiar is suddenly revealed as mysterious and foreign.A lonely man saving library books from an outbreak of mold listens to a coworker's tale about a blind woman and imbues it with his own sense of romance; a woman drives a Gold Firebird through the desert with a television playing "Rockford Files" reruns on the passen...

NOW A MAJOR FILM, LEAVE NO TRACE. Inspired by a true story, a riveting and unsettling novel about a girl and her father who live off the grid, in the shadows at the edge of civilization.Thirteen-year-old Caroline and her father live in Forest Park, an enormous nature preserve in Portland, Oregon. They inhabit an elaborate cave shelter, wash in a nearby creek, store perishables at the water's edge, use a makeshift septic system, tend a garden, even keep a li...

Beneath the surface of Lake Michigan there are vast systems: crosscutting currents, sudden drop-offs, depths of absolute darkness, shipwrecked bodies, hidden places. Peter Rock's stunning autobiographical novel begins in the '90s on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin. The narrator, a recent college graduate, and a young widow, Mrs. Abel, swim together at night, making their way across miles of open water, navigating the currents and swells carried by the rise and fall of the lake. The nature ...