Showing results by narrator "Samuel Roukin" in All Categories

It has been nearly two hundred years since Hadrian Marlowe assaulted the person of the Emperor and walked away from war. From his Empire. His duty. From the will and service of the eldritch being known only as the Quiet. The galaxy lies in the grip of a terrible plague, and worse, the Cielcin have overrun the realms of men. A messenger has come to Jadd, bearing a summons from the Sollan Emperor for the one-time hero. A summons, a pardon, and a plea.

Sophia Alexander, the beautiful daughter of a famous surgeon in Berlin, has had to grow up faster than most young women. When her mother falls ill, Sophia must take charge of her younger sister Theresa, look after her father and the household, while also volunteering at his hospital after school. Meanwhile, Hitler's rise to power and the violence in her very own town have Sophia concerned, but only her mother is willing to share her fears openly. After tragedy strikes and her mother dies, Sophia becomes increasingly involved in the resistance.

For almost a hundred years, Hadrian Marlowe has served the empire in its war against the Cielcin, a vicious alien race bent on humanity's destruction. Rumors of a new king among the Cielcin have reached the imperial throne. This one is not like the others. It does not raid borderworld territories, preferring precise, strategic attacks on the humans' empire.

The Viking Age - from 750 to 1050 saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture.

The galaxy remembers Hadrian Marlowe as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives - even the emperor himself - against Imperial orders. But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier. Fleeing his father and a future as a torturer, Hadrian finds himself stranded on a strange, backwater world.

The galaxy is burning. With the Cielcin united under one banner, the Sollan Empire stands alone after the betrayal of the Commonwealth. The Prophet-King of the Cielcin has sent its armies to burn the worlds of men, and worse, there are rumors … whispers that Hadrian Marlowe is dead, killed in the fighting. But it is not so. Hadrian survived with the help of the witch, Valka, and together they escaped the net of the enemy having learned a terrible truth: the gods that the Cielcin worship are real and will not rest until the universe is dark and cold.

Hadrian Marlowe is trapped. For nearly a century, he has been a guest of the Emperor, forced into the role of advisor, a prisoner of his own legend. But the war is changing. Mankind is losing. The Cielcin are spilling into human space from the fringes, picking their targets with cunning precision. The Great Prince Syriani Dorayaica is uniting their clans, forging them into an army and threat the likes of which mankind has never seen.

Hadrian Marlowe is lost. For half a century, he has searched the farther suns for the lost planet of Vorgossos, hoping to find a way to contact the elusive alien Cielcin. He has not succeeded, and for years has wandered among the barbarian Normans as captain of a band of mercenaries. Determined to make peace and bring an end to nearly 400 years of war, Hadrian must venture beyond the security of the Sollan Empire and among the Extrasolarians who dwell between the stars.

When Michael Moorcock began chronicling the adventures of the albino sorcerer Elric, last king of decadent Melniboné, and his sentient vampiric sword, Stormbringer, he set out to create a new kind of fantasy adventure, one that broke with tradition and reflected a more up-to-date sophistication of theme and style. The result was a bold and unique hero: a rock-and-roll antihero who would channel all the violent excesses of the '60s into one enduring archetype.

Crispin Marlowe grew up in his brother’s shadow, but Hadrian is gone, and his grandmother - the Duchess of Delos - is dying. Answering her summons, Crispin takes off on what should be a routine flight to the ducal palace from the castle at Devil’s Rest. But he is flying into a trap. There are whispers of treachery among the duchess’s many daughters, rumors of hidden knives in the planet’s court...if he can even make it there.

In one of the most well-known and well-loved fantasy epics of the 20th century, Elric is the brooding, albino emperor of the dying Kingdom of Melnibone. After defeating his nefarious cousin and gaining control over the epic sword, Stormbringer, Elric, prince of ruins, must decide what he’s willing to sacrifice in a fight against Armageddon. Stormbringer is the second in Michael Moorcock’s incredible series, which has transformed the fantasy genre for generations.

For thousands of years, the planet of Belusha has served the galactic Sollan Empire as its most notorious prison planet. It is here the very worst men in the Empire are locked away: murderers, traitors, deserters—each condemned to toil on the oil rigs and scrapyards of the planet in bitter cold, preyed upon both by the men of the Martian Guard set to watch over them, and by the Outborn reavers whose fathers escaped the work camps to scratch a living from the icy wilderness. It is a hard world. A desperate world. And it is here that Lorian Aristedes finds himself: alone; friendless; betrayed.

Bee Ridgway’s wildly inventive debut novel, The River of No Return, blends romance, conspiracy, and time travel for a tale sure to intrigue listeners. When soldier and aristocrat Nick Falcott is sent from a Napoleonic battlefield in 1815 to modern-day London, he never expects to go back - until the Guild calls for him. Returning home as if from the dead, Nick reunites with his lost love, Julia Percy, and enlists her help in finding a mysterious object known as the Talisman.

Magic marked Miles Singer for suffering the day he was born, doomed either to be a slave to his family's interest or to be committed to a witches' asylum. He went to war to escape his destiny and came home a different man, but he couldn't leave his past behind. The war between Aeland and Laneer leaves men changed, strangers to their friends and family. Even after faking his own death and reinventing himself as a doctor at a cash-strapped veteran's hospital, Miles can't hide what he truly is.

Elric is the estranged emperor of the Melnibonéan empire, struggling with his nature while desperately striving to move forward with his dying empire alongside the constant thirst of his soul-sucking sword, Stormbringer. Elric is on the hunt for the great Citadel of Forgotten Myths while traveling through the remnants of his empire with his tragic best friend Moonglum, as Elric seeks the answers to the nature of the phroon of The Young Kingdoms.

Architect Douglas Layton has lost everything. The balcony of one of his beautiful music halls collapsed during a packed performance, killing dozens. Layton knows the flaw was not in his design; someone else must have caused the dreadful catastrophe. But with no proof, Layton finds himself facing a five-year prison sentence. When he is finally freed, Layton starts over with a new name and identity, taking a job as a set painter. But as Layton begins to discover dead bodies hidden within theater halls across London, it soon becomes clear something darker is chasing him.

Trained from birth in swordplay and combat, a young knight named Siris has journeyed to the Dark Citadel with a single purpose: fight through the army of Titans to face the tyrannical God King in one-on-one combat. This was his father's sacred mission, and his father's before him, going back countless generations in an effort to free their people from enslavement.

Long months have passed since Siris and the God King, enemies betrayed together, were left to rot in the prison at the Vault of Tears. Their true enemy - the Worker of Secrets, creator of the Infinity Blade itself - now reigns. Upon finally obtaining freedom, Siris must unravel plots that seem to make no sense, lead a rebellion with no direction, and fight against the division within his very heart. The secrets unraveled will dig backward in time toward the origins of the deathless and the true nature of the world itself....

This collection of short stories and novelettes includes the previously published stories "The Potter's Daughter" (a prequel to the novel The Element of Fire), "Holy Places", "Rites of Passage", "Houses of the Dead", "Reflections" (the Giliead and Ilias stories, prequels to the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy), as well as "Night at the Opera" (a Nicholas and Reynard story original to this collection, set before the Nebula-nominated novel The Death of the Necromancer).

The sorcerer Alder fears sleep. The dead are pulling him to them at night. Through him they may free themselves and invade Earthsea. Alder seeks advice from Ged, once Archmage. Ged tells him to go to Tenar, Tehanu, and the young king at Havnor. They are joined by amber-eyed Irian, a fierce dragon able to assume the shape of a woman. The threat can be confronted only in the Immanent Grove on Roke, the holiest place in the world, and there the king, hero, sage, wizard, and dragon make a last stand.