I had a very distinct vision of what kind of mother I would be: patient, kind, and creative. And I can be all of these things, but so too can I be frustrated, furious, and exhausted beyond belief. This contradictory experience of motherhood was what I wanted to explore in Spilt Milk and is the motherhood exposed in these five books which, while very different in form, share a willingness to acknowledge the darker and less curated aspects of a relationship that can be as stifling as it is wonderful.
As Spilt Milk’s protagonist Bea Straw is a mum-blogger, I was keen to read experiences of real-life “mummy influencers”. Braithwaite’s book – part memoir, part manifesto – was of particular interest because she is Black, somewhat of a rarity in the picture of motherhood painted by social media that tends to be both very white and very middle class.
Documenting the difficult birth of her daughter and the subsequent mishandled complications, Braithwaite exposes the many and varied ways in which women of colour are disadvantaged and endangered by racial bias.
While light in tone, there’s a power and vulnerability in Braithwaite’s writing, and I learnt so much from this brilliant book.
My ache for the ancient is a disease. It’s probably safe to say that I am the creator of the world’s greatest range of Egypt-based fiction by a single author. My depth of knowledge comes from a lifetime spent studying ancient Egypt and Egyptian archaeology and making numerous research trips to Egypt. I am fascinated by the mystery of ancient Egypt and its potency and relevance to today’s world. I have written numerous series and stand-alone adventures.
This book was required reading for me as an Egyptophile and mystery thriller writer.
Ancient horror, an archaeological plot to revive the dead Queen Tera, a mummy with extra fingers. What’s not to love? It's an atmospheric genre I just can’t shake.
I’ve always been fascinated by ancient Egypt – a remote era of history, but so well preserved! I love reading the old documents and finding out what they ate or why the worker Tilamentu was absent from the building site one day. (Turns out he had a fight with his wife). Pop culture likes to focus on the mummies, especially the cursed kind, and I couldn’t help wondering why. Where did those ideas come from? Did the Egyptians actually believe in curses? And what would someone like Tilamentu Q. Public think of it all? I hope you enjoy learning about it as much as I did!
The Victorians loved mummies and mummy stories... and before I read The Mummy’s Curse, I’d never heard of any of them! The nineteenth century’s obsession with Egypt and curses doesn’t get talked about much today. This book opened me up to a whole new world of stories, including some strange curse tales that never got quite as big as King Tut. (Which is a shame, because some of them are wonderfully creepy!)
In the winter of 1922-23 archaeologist Howard Carter and his wealthy patron George Herbert, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, sensationally opened the tomb of Tutenkhamen. Six weeks later Herbert, the sponsor of the expedition, died in Egypt. The popular press went wild with rumours of a curse on those who disturbed the Pharaoh's rest and for years followed every twist and turn of the fate of the men who had been involved in the historic discovery. Long dismissed by Egyptologists, the mummy's curse remains a part of popular supernatural belief. Roger Luckhurst explores why the myth has captured the British…
I was fascinated by American True Crime magazines from an early age. I used to buy them with my pocket money from a second-hand bookstore near my home. I graduated to reading novels by the age of ten, sneaking my father’s book collection into my bedroom one at a time to read after lights out. His books covered everything from The Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins to The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley. By seventeen, I promised myself I’d write a novel one day. Most of my books are crime themed with a supernatural flavour. My debut, The Sister was published in 2013 and since then I’ve completed three more novels and several short stories.
In her first crime novel, Gaites portrays a psychopathic monster in Ivan Smallbone, and a relentless race against time by police to stop him. Populated by flawed characters, Gaites explores the human psyche to great effect in driving her novel to its inevitable and tragic conclusion. Not for the squeamish.
1960 – Late in life Marjorie Smallbone gave birth to her only child. Relieved he was perfect, she named him Ivan. As the years went by, she discovered perfection is only skin-deep.
1983 – Sentenced to serve eight years in prison for the manslaughter of many young school children, upon her release in 1991 June Saunders’ appearance had changed. Shortly after, so did her name.
1994 – New Year’s Eve. DI Leo Thorne has identified similarities between two vicious rapes, but with no evidence to go on, his investigation’s stalled before it’s begun. Then, a sadistic rapist…
I’ve had a passion for weirdness in mundane settings since my childhood days watchingThe Addams Family in a boring suburb. I grew up with the Apollo program, but as I realized I’d never be an astronaut, I increasingly turned to writing science fiction and fantasy set on Earth. I discovered role-playing games shortly after D&D came out, but when I became bored with characters who were only after money and mayhem, I found other RPGs and began writing for them. FGU’s Bushidointroduced me to Japanese mythology, which inspired my first urban fantasy novel, The Art of Arrow Cutting, which led me to being invited to write Shadowrunnovels.
Wizard is one of Seattle’s homeless magicians, a seer who tells the truth to those who need it, haunted by a nebulous menace and hiding from his past. Apart from its (often ambiguous) fantasy elements, it’s a beautifully-written guide to urban survival and to downtown Seattle (as well as the setting for my latest novels).
The fifth book in the Megan Lindholm (Robin Hobb) backlist.
Seattle: a place as magical as the Emerald City.
Subtle magic seeps through the cracks in the paving stones of the sprawling metropolis. But only the inhabitants who possess special gifts are open to the city's consciousness; finding portents in the graffiti, reading messages in the rubbish or listening to warnings in the skipping-rope chants of children.
Wizard is bound to Seattle and her magic. His gift is the Knowing - a powerful enchantment allowing him to know the truth of things; to hear the life-stories of ancient mummies locked…
As a lifelong Kentuckian with a lifelong fascination for history, true crime, biography, and the supernatural, once I started writing, I pursued these and related topics. The writer Charles Fort’s research methods interested me: he read old newspapers looking for forgotten stories. That seemed a good way to find little-known information. I am a lecturer in the English Department at Eastern Kentucky University and have spent two decades reading old newspapers issue by issue between classes and taking notes on possible stories. The books on my list also include much detail on entertaining obscurities, and I hope you enjoy them.
This is a lavishly illustrated collection of old and new oddities from around the state, including cryptids, ghosts, cave mummies, UFOs, roadside attractions, the Melungeons (what’s a Melungeon? Read it and see), and the famous Blue People.
I was attracted by the entertaining writing style, the inclusion of both documented fact and folklore, and biographies of historical characters.
That’s a question Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman have enjoyed asking for years—and their offbeat sense of curiosity led them to create the bestselling phenomenon, Weird N.J. Now the weirdness has spread throughout key locales in the U.S. Each fun and intriguing volume offers more than 250 illustrated pages of places where tourists usually don’t venture—it’s chock-full of oddball curiosities, ghostly places, local legends, crazy characters, cursed roads, and peculiar roadside attractions. What’s NOT shockingly odd here: that every previously published Weird book has become a bestseller in its…
I’ve always been fascinated by ancient Egypt – a remote era of history, but so well preserved! I love reading the old documents and finding out what they ate or why the worker Tilamentu was absent from the building site one day. (Turns out he had a fight with his wife). Pop culture likes to focus on the mummies, especially the cursed kind, and I couldn’t help wondering why. Where did those ideas come from? Did the Egyptians actually believe in curses? And what would someone like Tilamentu Q. Public think of it all? I hope you enjoy learning about it as much as I did!
When my father and I were getting ready to visit Egypt for the first time, he asked me for a book to introduce him to Egyptology. I gave him Red Land, Black Land. It brings you right into the distant yet familiar world of ancient Egypt: we see families fighting in letters, bored kids falling asleep in school, and scribes gloating over how amazing they are compared to everyone else. The past can seem so strange, but this book brings it to life.
A fascinating, erudite, and witty glimpse of the human side of ancient Egypt—this acclaimed classic work is now revised and updated for a new generation
Displaying the unparalleled descriptive power, unerring eye for fascinating detail, keen insight, and trenchant wit that have made the novels she writes (as Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels) perennial New York Times bestsellers, internationally renowned Egyptologist Barbara Mertz brings a long-buried civilization to vivid life. In Red Land, Black Land, she transports us back thousands of years and immerses us in the sights, aromas, and sounds of day-to-day living in the legendary desert realm that…
My ache for the ancient is a disease. It’s probably safe to say that I am the creator of the world’s greatest range of Egypt-based fiction by a single author. My depth of knowledge comes from a lifetime spent studying ancient Egypt and Egyptian archaeology and making numerous research trips to Egypt. I am fascinated by the mystery of ancient Egypt and its potency and relevance to today’s world. I have written numerous series and stand-alone adventures.
I found this to be a surprisingly elegant and sensuous read for a novel about an ancient Egyptian mummy. Awakening in Edwardian London and consuming the elixir of life, the revivified Rameses is doomed to wander the earth without satisfying his unquenchable desires, pursuing a beautiful aristocrat while desperately longing for the ancient beauty, Cleopatra.
Echoes of She and an ancient, forbidden cycle of love made it irresistible to me.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Ramses the Great returns in this “darkly magical” (USA Today) novel from bestselling author Anne Rice
“The reader is held captive and, ultimately, seduced.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Ramses the Great lives!
But having drunk the elixer of live, he is now Ramses the Damned, doomed forever to wander the earth, desperate to quell hungers that can never be satisfied—for food, for wine, for women.
Reawakened in opulent Edwardian London, he becomes Dr. Ramsey, expert in Egyptology. He also becomes the close companion of voluptuous, adventurous Julie Stratford, heiress to a vast shipping fortune and the center…
If you love a cozy mystery and haven't yet met Amelia Peabody--amateur Egyptologist and aspiring detective--then you're in for a treat! Formidable, self-confident, intelligent, and armed with a parasol, Amelia Peabody takes on the adventure and danger of the world of archeology in the Victorian Era, determined to unearth Egypt's tantalizing past, as well as uproot its present criminal networks. This first book in the series introduces Amelia in all her glory, and is as funny and charming as it is intriguing.
Amelia Peabody is Elizabeth Peters' most brilliant and best-loved creation, a thoroughly Victorian feminist who takes the stuffy world of archaeology by storm with her shocking men's pants and no-nonsense attitude!
In this first adventure, our headstrong heroine decides to use her substantial inheritance to see the world. On her travels, she rescues a gentlewoman in distress - Evelyn Barton-Forbes - and the two become friends. The two companions continue to Egypt where they face mysteries, mummies and the redoubtable Radcliffe Emerson, an outspoken archaeologist, who doesn't need women to help him solve mysteries -- at least that's what he…
I’ve always been fascinated by ancient Egypt – a remote era of history, but so well preserved! I love reading the old documents and finding out what they ate or why the worker Tilamentu was absent from the building site one day. (Turns out he had a fight with his wife). Pop culture likes to focus on the mummies, especially the cursed kind, and I couldn’t help wondering why. Where did those ideas come from? Did the Egyptians actually believe in curses? And what would someone like Tilamentu Q. Public think of it all? I hope you enjoy learning about it as much as I did!
I remember being a kid in a museum, staring at the figurines making up a strange judgment scene. Gods weighing a man’s heart against a feather – what was that all about? If you want to understand the ancient Egyptians, you need a good Book of the Dead. This translation of the goldsmith Sobekmose’s burial copy won’t bring any cursed mummies back to life, but it gives you a road map to ancient Egyptian paradise... and some neat spells to control demons, if they happen to turn up along the way.
The Book of the Dead of Sobekmose, in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, New York, is one of the most important surviving examples of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead genre. Such `books' - papyrus scrolls - were composed of traditional funerary texts, including magic spells, that were thought to assist a dead person on their journey into the afterlife. The ancient Egyptians believed in an underworld fraught with dangers that needed to be carefully navigated, from the familiar, such as snakes and scorpions, to the extraordinary: lakes of fire to cross, animal-headed demons to pass and, of…
