Showing results by author "Alma Alexander" in All Categories

In Alma Alexander’s enthralling new novel, Simonis is a woman who lived many lives before rising to the top – a helpless child in circus performances, an accomplished courtesan and spy, a heretic who sheltered men thought to be damned for what they believed.

Four hundred years after The Secrets of Jin-shei, the Syai Empire is on the brink of civil war. A new voice preaching equality promises hope for the downtrodden, but the ensuing people's revolution brings terror, reeducation camps, and death to anyone embracing the old ways. An outsider and a child of two worlds, Amais searches for the magical bond of jin-shei, the women's oath, in her ancestral home of Syai, unaware that her quest will bring her to the very person who may destroy her and her family.

Thea returns to the Wandless Academy only to discover her friends are as out of sorts as she is. It’s only when she discovers she is an elemental mage - a mage so rare that only four other wizards in history had similar talents - that the pieces start falling in place.

Six crew members went out on the Parada, Earth’s first starship. All contact was lost, and the ship vanished for almost two centuries. When the Parada’s successor found the drifting ship and somehow managed to bring it home, the six crew members were not only still alive but barely older, due to the time dilation effects of near-FTL travel. Their return was a miracle - but it could not be revealed to the waiting world. The problem was, six individuals went out to the stars. More than seventy fractured personalities came back.

What do you get when ordinary email spam becomes infused with magic? Spellspam - and it's not supposed to exist. As far as Thea and her friends know, computers are meant to be inert vehicles for storing magic spells, not magical processors themselves.

Great things have been expected of Thea, the seventh child of two seventh children. Now, with Cheveyo, a mage of the Anasazi, Thea has begun to weave herself a new magical identity, infused with elements of the original worlds. But back home, Thea keeps her abilities hidden and attends the Wandless Academy, the one school on Earth for those who have no apparent magical talent. It is there that Thea realizes that her enemies are hungrier and more dangerous than she knew.

On the eve of the end of the world, 20 December 2012, five friends meet in Spanish Gardens, the cafe where they had celebrated their college graduation 20 years before. Over Irish coffees, they reminisce—and reveal long-held and disturbing secrets. Each friend in turn is given a curious set of instructions by an enigmatic bartender named Ariel: "Your life is filled with crossroads, and you are free to choose one road or another at any time. Stepping through this door takes away all choices except two—the choice to live a different life, or return to this one."