Luka and the Fire of Life

Luka and the Fire of Life

Salman Rushdie

Fiction R895L

Rashid Khalifa, the legendary storyteller of Kahani, has fallen into a deep sleep from which no one can wake him. To keep his father from slipping away entirely, Luka must travel to the Magic World and steal the ever-burning Fire of Life. Thus begins a quest replete with unlikely creatures, strange alliances, and seemingly insurmountable challenges as Luka and an assortment of enchanted companions race through peril after peril, pass through the land of the Badly Behaved Gods, and reach the Fire itself, where Luka's fate, and that of his father, will be decided.

A Confusion of Princes

A Confusion of Princes

Garth Nix

Fiction N65c

You'd think being a Prince in a vast intergalactic empire would be about as good as it gets. Particularly when Princes are faster, smarter, and stronger than normal humans. Not to mention being mostly immortal.

But it isn't as great as it sounds. Princes need to be hard to kill—as Khemri learns the minute he becomes one—for they are always in danger. Their greatest threat? Other Princes. Every Prince wants to become Emperor, and the surest way to do so is to kill, dishonor, or sideline any potential competitor. There are rules, but as Khemri discovers, rules can be bent and even broken.

There are also mysteries. Khemri is drawn into the hidden workings of the Empire and dispatched on a secret mission. In the ruins of space battle he meets a young woman, called Raine, who challenges his view of the Empire, of Princes, and of himself.

But Khemri is a Prince, and even if he wanted to leave the Empire behind, there are forces that have very definite plans for his future. . . .

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell

Fiction M692c

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilization—the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.

Freak the Mighty

Freak the Mighty

Rodman Philbrick

Fiction P534f

"Killer Kane, Killer Kane, had a kid who got no brain!"

That's what they used to yell at me, and then they'd run like crazy because I'm the spitting image of my bad old dad. Or so they say. I never gave it a lot of thought because basically it was easier to act brainless, and when you're as big as I am, people believe it. Even my mother's people, Grim and Gram, even they were afraid of me.

 

Everything changed when Freak moved into the neighborhood. Little dude about two feet tall, he was smarter than Einstein, so smart he wrote his own dictionary, and invented flying machines, and discovered buried treasure, and the weird thing is, he wasn't afraid of me. No way, he was too smart for that.

 

Okay, so Freak was a genius, but was I really as dumb as I looked? You better believe it. I never had a brain until Freak came along because there were certain things I didn't want to remember. Bad things, terrible things. 

 

Later, when we started having our adventures, slaying dragons and fools and walking high above the world, it was Freak himself who taught me that remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether is happened or not.

 

And that's the truth. The unvanquished truth. Like everything inside this book.

A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel

A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel

Madeleine L'Engle, Hope Larson

GN L329w

Late one night, three otherworldly creatures appear and sweep Meg Murry, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe away on a mission to save Mr. Murray, who has gone missing while doing top-secret work for the government. They travel via tesseract--a wrinkle that transports one across space and time--to the planet Camazotz, where Mr. Murray is being held captive. There they discover a dark force that threatens not only Mr. Murray but the saftey of the whole universe.

Illustrated for the first time, the 1963 Newbery Medal winner, A Wrinkle in Time, is now available in a spellbinding graphic novel adaptation!