The Night Circus

by Erin Morgentern

Wednesday, January 2, 2013 at 7:00 pm

Erin Morgenstern's dark, enchanting debut takes us to the black and white tents of Le Cirque des Reves, a circus that arrives without warning, simply appearing when yesterday it was not there. Young Celia and Marco have been cast into a rivalry at The Night Circus, one arranged long ago by powers they do not fully understand. Over time, their lives become more intricately enmeshed in a dance of love, joy, deceit, heartbreak, and magic. Author Morgenstern knows her world inside and out, and she guides the reader with a confident hand. The setting and tone are never less than mesmerizing. The characters are well-realized and memorable. But it is the Night Circus itself that might be the most memorable of all.

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South.  Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time they stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain wheather or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Brandon Sanderson, fantasy's newest master tale spinner, author of the acclaimed debut Elantris, dares to turn a genre on its head by asking a simple question: What if the hero of prophecy fails?  What kind of world results when the Dark Lord is in charge?  The answer will be found in the Misborn Trilogy, a saga of surprises and magical martial-arts action that begins in Mistborn.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013 at 7:00 pm 

A Fire upon the Deep is a big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale.  Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function.  Nobody knows what strange force patritioned space into these 'regions of thought,' but when the warring Straumli ream use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of wolds and enslave all natural and artificial intelligence.

Murderous conspiracies rise to the surface, old scores are ready to be settled, and the line between hero and villain is sharp enough to draw blood.  Unpredictable, compelling, wickedly funny, and packed with unforgetable characters, The Blade Itself is noir fantasy with a real cutting edge.

World War Z

Wednesday, June 5, 2013 at 7:00 pm  

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humantiy. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet.  He recrded the testimonyof men, women, and sometims children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time.  World War Z is the result.  Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

American Gods

Wednesday, July 3, 2013 at 7:00 pm 

After three years in prison, Shadow has done his time. But as the days, then the hours, them the minutes, then the seconds until his release tick away, he can feel a storm building.  Two days before he gets out, his wife Laura dies in a mysterious car crash, in apparently adulterous circumsances.  Dazed, Shadow travels home, only to encounter the bizarre Mr. Wednesday claiming to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America.  Together they embark on a very strange journey across the States, along the way solving the murders which have occured ever winter in one small American town.  Bt they are being pursued by someone with whom Shadow must make his peace...  Disturbing, gripping and profoundly strange, Neil Gaiman's epic new novel sees him on the road to finding the soul of America.