Metaphysical Fiction

Kai is the hardest working warrior in his generation... and the unluckiest. In a world where most people receive magical skills, classes, or cultivation, Kai has nothing but his wits and his strength. His only choice will be to forge a new path against fate, no matter where it takes him. Savage monsters pour endlessly from the wasteland, threatening the survival of civilization itself. They say that human strength isn't enough and only those gifted with destined powers have a chance of making a difference. Kai is hungry to fight in that war, to be someone who matters.

“At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created,” begins Time Shelter’s enigmatic narrator, who goes unnamed. “In the mid-seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a “vagrant in time” who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century.

After living in the city of Orphalese for 12 years, a prophet is about to board a ship which will carry him home. He is stopped by a seeress and the people of the city, who ask him for his insights into life. The book is divided into chapters dealing with love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A vibrant portrait of four college friends—Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley—who formed a new philosophical tradition while Oxford's men were away fighting World War II. The history of European philosophy...

An epic story about war, peace, and the price of freedom, Forever Free reintroduces listeners to William Mandella - who has been living peacefully on the planet called Middle Finger, a refuge for humans who refuse to become part of the group mind known as Man. But after decades of this peace, Mandella and others are tired of living like zoo animals. So they steal a starship - and embark upon a voyage that will forever change their understanding of the universe, and themselves.

Der Klassiker erstmals als ungekürzte Lesung. Josef Knecht hat es im altehrwürdigen Orden Kastalien bis zum angesehenen Magister Ludi, zum Meister des Glasperlenspiels, gebracht. Dieses Spiel vereint in sich das Wissen und die Künste der ganzen Welt. Wir begleiten den jungen, hochbegabten Waisenknaben Josef Knecht auf seiner Laufbahn durch alle Stufen der Ordenshierarchie bis zu dem Punkt, an dem in ihm eine weitreichende Erkenntnis reift.

Time has begun moving backward. People greet each other with “goodbye,” blow smoke into cigarettes, and rise from the dead. When one of those rising dead is the famous and powerful prophet Anarch Peak, a number of groups start a mad scramble to find him first—but their motives are not exactly benevolent, because Anarch Peak may just be worth more dead than alive, and these groups will do whatever they must to send him back to the grave.

Julian Barnes pens a kind of detective story, relating a cranky amateur scholar’s search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert and the obsession of this detective, whose life seems to oddly mirror those of Flaubert’s characters.

Jesus is a fresh and inspirational re-imagining of a young man's transformational journey from carpenter's son to revolutionary leader to the man many believe to be the savior of the world. Very little is known or recorded about Jesus in his formative years. In the Gospel stories, we witness the birth of Jesus and then see him as a young boy of 12 intensely questioning the Rabbis in the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

Dans le champ où il vient d’atterrir pour offrir des baptêmes de l’air à trois dollars les dix minutes, Richard aperçoit un autre zinc tout semblable au sien. Adossé à sa carlingue, un personnage sympathique et mystérieux cherche à fuir le rôle de maître à penser à qui les foules demandent toujours plus. Il lui apprendra que chaque être humain peut se libérer des barrières qu’il a lui-même construites comme autant d’illusions sur sa propre existence. Il lui suffit pour cela de suivre une idée simple...

Ask for the story of the mad sisters of Esi, and you'll get a thousand contradictory folktales. Superstitious sailors, curious children, and obsessed academics have argued over the particulars for generations. They have wondered about the mad sisters' two greatest marvels: the museum of collective memory that sprawls underneath our universe, waiting for any who call for it, and the living, impossible, Whale of Babel.

July, 1940. Blitz-ridden London: Marnie Fern’s life is torn apart when her grandfather is killed in an air raid. But once she discovers that he’d been working undercover as a radio operative – or pianist – for the Dutch resistance, Marnie knows she must complete his mission – no matter the cost. Nazi-occupied Amsterdam: At the other end of the wireless, fellow pianist Corrie Bakker is caught in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse as she desperately tries to keep her loved ones out of the line of fire – even if it means sacrificing herself.

In the spirit of Amor Towles and George Saunders, the renowned, bestselling Norwegian author Frode Grytten takes readers on a quietly epic journey: ferry driver Nils Vik’s last route along the fjord, on what he knows will be his last day alive. Nils Vik wakes up on November the 18th and...

Aria Abbott has never had a home. Drifting through the foster system for most of her life, she finally finds herself in a situation so unbearable that she has no choice but to run away. Sleeping on the streets pushes Aria beyond any suffering she has felt before; the only thing worse than seeing no escape is the knowledge that no one in the world cares enough to try and find her. Enter Taylor, a homeless young man with a charismatic smile and a dream of fame, fortune, and the sunshine of LA. Swept up in his energy, Aria and Taylor board a greyhound bus and never look back.

For Dr. Siena Dupont and her ambitious team, the Alpenglow glacier expedition is a career-defining opportunity. But 30 miles into the desolate Deadswitch Wilderness, they discover a missing hiker dangling from a tree, and their satellite phone fails to call out.

Henry is a middle-aged, happily married man in the 20th century. After suffering a sudden heart attack, Henry finds himself in the unknown realm of the afterlife. Lost, alone, and confused, he meets Croton. As they embark on their journey together, Croton opens Henry’s eyes to all the beauty of his new reality and all the exploring that awaits him. But not everything is sunshine and rainbows. Henry eventually learns who Croton really is—and that’s when their adventure truly begins.

Quinn Darkova made a vow from the very beginning. And now she's home. For revenge. Except N'skara isn't the same as it was ten years ago, and the person she came for is nowhere to be found. After being taken ashore by armed guards of the same Council they came to sway, Quinn knows it's up to her to uncover the truth about what really happened, while seeking the retribution owed to her. Lazarus knew she was hiding something. He knew she had unfinished business in N'skara. But never could he have known this. He hadn't predicted how set in their ways the people were.

Living deep within the mysterious southern forests, the spiritual Ninkuraaja people are being hunted to the brink of extinction by bloodthirsty raiders known only as Woves. Nobody knows better than a Ninkuraa that a Wove deserves only death.

A secret government unit is formed under the oversight of Adam Harrison, famed paranormal investigator. The case: In a historic mansion in New Orleans’ French Quarter, a senator’s wife falls to her death from a balcony. Most think she jumped, distraught over the loss of her young son. Some say she was pushed. And yet others believe she was beckoned by the ghostly spirits that inhabit the house - once the site of a serial killer’s grisly work.

The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional recreation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.