Hiromi Goto0.0 From the award-winning author of Chorus of Mushrooms, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canadian Region and was co-winner of the Canada Japan Book Award, The Kappa Child is the tale of four Japanese Canadian sisters struggling to escape the bonds of a family and landscape as inhospitable as the sweltering prairie heat.
In a family not at all reminiscent of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, four Japanese-Canadian sisters struggle to escape the bonds of a family and landscape as inhospitable as the sweltering prairie heat. Their father, moved by an incredible dream of optimism, decides to migrate from the lush green fields of British Columbia to Alberta. There, he is determined to deny the hard-pan limitations of the prairie and to grow rice. Despite a dearth of both water and love, the family discovers, through sorrow and fear, the green kiss of the Kappa Child, a mythical creature who blesses those who can imagine its magic...
Ken MacLeod0.0 With his sharp, fast-paced, challenging novel Dark Light (sequel to the Prometheus Award-nominated Cosmonaut Keep in the Engines of Light series), Ken MacLeod reaffirms why he is science fiction's hottest new writer at the turn of the millennium.
From the days of the dinosaurs, mysterious aliens have been transporting earthly life forms across the galaxy to the worlds of the Second Sphere. Here, the descendants of humans abducted from the Stone Age and from colonial America coexist with dinosaurs--and with the saurs, their intelligent descendants, who are technologically superior to the humans. This arrangement is disturbed by the arrival of nearly immortal (but far from indestructible) humans from 21st-century Earth--men like Matt Cairns, who have no desire to let the secret of interstellar flight remain in the hands of the inscrutable, almost godlike aliens.
Sheri S. Tepper0.0 The bizarre events that have been occurring across the United States--unexplained "oddities" tracked by Air Defense, mysterious disappearances, shocking deaths--seem to have no bearing on Benita Alvarez-Shipton's life. That is, until the soft-spoken thirty-six-year-old bookstore manager is approached by a pair of aliens asking her to transmit their message of peace to the powers that be in Washington. Suddenly an ordinary woman with a poor self-image and low self-esteem has been thrust into the limelight, as she leaves behind an Albuquerque home on the brink of foreclosure and a drunken bully of an abusive husband to undertake a mission of utmost importance to her planet and its peoples.
Her obligation does not end once the message is delivered, however, for the Pistach have offered their human hosts a spectacular opportunity for knowledge and enrichment. And Benita is to act as sole liaison between the two sentient races. The more she learns about the extraterrestrials who transformed her gray existence, the more her appreciation grows for their culture, their beliefs, and their art--especially the ancient and mystical Fresco that appears to dominate their collective lives. And the easier it becomes to shed the psychological and societal restraints that inhibited her own growth as an individual.
But alongside the promise is a dire, unspoken threat. Because the Pistach are not the only space-faring species making their presence known on Earth. There are others--cold, malevolent, hungry--who have now set their sights on Benita, and their accomplices may be as close as Capitol Hill. And the desperate race to save herself and two worlds could carry Benita Alvarez far from her home planet ... and light years away from anything she has ever been.
