Stuart Little

A mesmerizing tale of family secrets, a mysterious circus, and a cursed book—The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler blends magic, mystery, and historical fiction beautifully.

Simon Watson lives alone on the Long Island Sound in his family home, a house perched on the edge of a cliff that is slowly crumbling into the sea. His parents are long dead, his mother having drowned in the water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, works for a travelling carnival and seldom calls. On a day in late June, Simon receives a mysterious book from an antiquarian bookseller; it has been sent to him because it is inscribed with the name Verona Bonn, Simon’s grandmother. The book tells the story of two doomed lovers who were part of a travelling circus more than two hundred years ago. The paper crackles with age as Simon turns the yellowed pages filled with notes and sketches. He is fascinated, yet as he reads Simon becomes increasingly unnerved. Why do so many women in his family drown on 24th July? And could Enola, who has suddenly turned up at home for the first time in years, risk the same terrible fate? As 24th July draws ever closer, Simon must unlock the mysteries of the book, and decode his family history, before it’s too late.

Penguin Popular Classics – Kidnapped – complete and unabridged “Kidnapped” is a classic adventure story, as thrilling today as when it was first published. As he sets off into the world to seek his last remaining kinsman, Uncle Ebenezer, young David Balfour has no idea of the hazards and intrigues that the encounter will bring. He finds his uncle to be a decrepit, miserly man, and soon realizes that Ebenezer is also a liar. But before he can fathom his machinations, David is tricked into boarding the brig Covenant, and bound for slavery in distant Carolina… Overcoming the perils of sea and the turbulent fortunes that befall him after he is shipwrecked – including a charge of murder – David ultimately emerges triumphant to claim his rightful heritage.

The vicious-looking airCRaft shot aCRoss the sky at near supersonic speed.

It was a modified Hercules cargo plane, known as an MC-130 “Combat Talon,” the delivery vehicle of choice for U.S. Special Forces units.

This Combat Talon stayed high, very high, it was as if it was trying to avoid being seen by radar systems down at sea level. This was unusual, because there was nothing down there—according to the maps, the nearest land in this part of the Pacific was an atoll 500 klicks to the east.

Then the rear loading ramp of the Combat Talon rumbled open and several dozen tiny figures issued out from it in rapid sequence, spreading out into the sky behind the soaring plane.

The forty-strong flock of paratroopers plummeted to earth, men in high-altitude jumpsuits—full-face breathing masks; streamlined black bodysuits. They angled their bodies downward as they fell, so that they flew head-first, their masks pointed into the onrushing wind, becoming human spears, freefalling with serious intent.

It was a classic HALO drop—high-altitude, low-opening. You jumped from 37,000 feet, fell fast and hard, and then stopped dangerously close to the ground, right at your drop zone.

Curiously, however, the forty elite troops falling to earth today fell in identifiable subgroups, ten men to a group, as if they were trying to remain somehow separate.

One man’s journey in the footsteps of a great explorer into the heart of Africa.

When he himself was a young man, Thesiger led an expedition to explore the course of the Awash river in Ethiopia. Every westerner that had gone before him had been killed by local tribesmen. Needless to say, he survived.

In Praise of Savagery is a highly original book that defies classification but is always effortlessly readable.