Cirrus@Austlit

'Fire, smoke, and ash consume the continent in the darkest chapter yet in The Call of the Rift series

'The Battle of Tjarnnaast left its mark: Katja is adrift, haunted by her memories of the battle and dark visions of a desolate wasteland. Her only guidance is her parents’ cryptic messages from the spirit world. On their instructions, Katja goes south to track down her mercenary friend Tiernan. Maybe together, they can find the Rúonbattai’s elusive cleric leader, defeat their ranks forever, and end the war. Then Katja could finally go home — if she can decide where home is.

'Yet Tiernan is missing, and Katja’s best hope of rescuing him is by striking unlikely alliances — with untrustworthy acquaintances and new allies hiding dangerous secrets. Druids whisper of dry winters and warming oceans and the war-torn nation is a tinderbox ready to ignite. Katja must use everything in her power, from her water magic to her hand in marriage, to battle the growing flames. If they erupt into a wildfire, everyone and everything she loves will burn with them.' (Publication summary)

'Step through the portal into a world ravaged by chaotic spirits and corrupted magic in the third book of The Call of the Rift high fantasy series.

'Kateiko Rin lives a quiet life with her parents and her people in the coastal rainforest. Everything changes when her estranged uncle washes up on their shores, harried and half-dead, trailed by two blue-eyed children no one knew existed. To protect her family, Kateiko secrets away her young cousins. Caring for them includes hiding their ties to the Rúonbattai, a warlike cult trying to claim the land for themselves along with as many lives as they can. With the immigrant mage Tiernan and his companions Jorumgard and Nerio, Kateiko enters into the fray, facing strange, dangerous magic that unwinds the fabric of time. She must end the war before it tears the land, and her family, apart.

'In the third book in The Call of the Rift series, Jae Waller invites us into another dimension and introduces an alternate version of her captivating heroine in a world full of familiar and unknown faces, including many we thought long dead.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'The Blackbird Battle has left all sides devastated. The wind spirit Suriel has disappeared. A hard winter is coming, and famine stalks the land. Kateiko Rin returns to her people, ready at last to reintegrate into her community, but the dangers of the unsettled times come raging to her doorstep and Kateiko is left with no choice but to battle the forces that seek to open a rift between the worlds. Leading an unlikely alliance that includes her new love, Airedain, and her old one, Tiernan, Kateiko must risk all to stop the coming disaster.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'“Bennett’s artistry lies in his ability to create poems that shatter complacency with bricks of loaded language.” — Quill & Quire on Civil and Civic

'“How are you doing, happinesswise?” This is the unifying thread, the casual-sounding but slant and penetrating question posed by these poems as they interrogate what we tell ourselves about happiness, about its opposite, and about ourselves in the process.

'Happinesswise is both cacophony and chorus: it’s the voices of palliative patients and physicians, and the place where the dream state of a young pregnant woman clashes with the online reality of daily life. It’s personal too: a suite explores a five-year period of Bennett’s autistic son’s childhood, charting a journey of love and misunderstandings, of anxiety and celebration as the wonders of neurodiversity unfold.

'There are elegies too. And confessional poems, like “On the Occasion of Her Swearing In,” where Bennett witnesses up close his friend’s remarkable transition from Afghan refugee and grassroots activist to member of parliament and cabinet minister. Other poems demarcate the gaps (literal and less so) found every day in rural Ontario, or consider personal, political, and cultural history within a series of loops and twists.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Seventeen-year-old Kateiko doesn't want to be Rin anymore - not if it means sacrificing lives to protect the dead. Her only way out is to join another tribe, a one-way trek through the coastal rainforest. Killing a colonial soldier in the woods isn't part of the plan. Neither is spending the winter with Tiernan, an immigrant who keeps a sword with his carpentry tools. His log cabin leaks and his stories about other worlds raise more questions than they answer.

'Then the air spirit Suriel, long thought dormant, resurrects a war. For Kateiko, protecting other tribes in her confederacy is atonement. For Tiernan, war is a return to the military life he's desperate to forget.

'Leaving Tiernan means losing the one man Kateiko trusts. Staying with him means abandoning colonists to a death sentence. In a region tainted by prejudice and on the brink of civil war, she has to decide what's worth dying - or killing - for.'

Source: Publisher's world.

'In the early hours of 19 February 1980, Bon Scott, lead singer of the rock band AC/DC, left The Music Machine in Camden, London, with a man called Alistair Kinnear, whereupon he lost consciousness and was left to sleep in Alistair’s Renault 5, parked outside Alistair’s East Dulwich apartment.

'That evening, Bon’s lifeless body was found, still in the car. He was pronounced dead on arrival at King’s College Hospital.

'Less than two months later, far away in the Caribbean, recording began on Back In Black, AC/DC’s tribute to their fallen bandmate. Worldwide, it would go on to become the biggest selling rock album of all time.

'The legend of the man known around the world simply as ‘Bon’ only grows with each passing year – in death the AC/DC icon has become a god to millions of people – but how much of his story is myth or pure fabrication and how much of the real man do we know?

'There have been books that claim to tell his story. They haven’t even come close.

'Jesse Fink, author of the critically acclaimed international bestseller The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC, leaves no stone unturned for Bon: The Last Highway, a book years in the making that finally solves the riddle of the death of Bon Scott.

'The 1977–80 period forged the legend of AC/DC. There wasn’t a harder working band in the music business. But, as Fink startlingly reveals, the relentless AC/DC machine was also threatening to come apart. Fink has answers to the nagging questions rock ’n’ roll fans have been asking since 1980 and reveals secrets that will change music history.

'Bon: The Last Highway is the original, forensic, unflinching and masterful biography Bon Scott has so richly deserved and music fans around the world have been waiting for.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In this powerful novel of love and family, a doctor named Paris follows a nurse to a country on the brink of civil war. When a confrontation does break out, they are swept up by rebel forces and separated. The nurse, Helen, is pregnant; she escapes, but Paris is left behind, imprisoned by rebels as war rages.

'A narrative of brutal power about parental bonds, forgiveness, and identity, The Colonial Hotel recasts for the 21st century the ancient story of Paris, Helen, and Oenone. While the action might be ripped from international headlines, Bennett creates a wholly new take on an age-old tale set in the bleakest aspect of our unstable, yet remarkable, world.'

Source : publisher's blurb