Showing results by narrator "David Pickering" in All Categories

The history of Ukraine is a fascinating story of how cultures, political systems, religions, and power have met, intersected, morphed, and expanded. The region was relatively sparsely populated for much of ancient history, a wilderness of rivers, forests, and steppes, but that does not detract from the rich historical development of the region.

On December 16, 1945, Prince Konoe committed suicide after refusing to collaborate with US Army officer Bonner Fellers in Operation Blacklist. His refusal to exonerate Emperor Hirohito and the imperial family of war crimes responsibilities. A week before he took the cyanide, he wrote a memoir regarding his experience governing Imperial Japan during World War 2. The memoir shows many efforts of Prince Konoe's efforts for negotiations with Chinese and US government officials to try to end the war early as well as his governing during a time of crisis.

Logicide! Heretic! Everyone knows cats can't talk. Everyone except Niclas, a halfwit slum boy who's just landed a new job as a talking cat's man-servant. But this is Laburnum and the age of Rationalism. Here, the Academy's Inquisition takes illogical happenings very seriously. Locking people up, throwing away keys, that sort of thing. And it's not just the Crimson Men Niclas and his new master have to worry about. A man with no name has come to the capital in search of the Black Science - they call him Witchhunter.

The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy is a collection of historical mystery fantasy short stories by Avram Davidson, featuring his scholarly detective character Doctor Eszterhazy and set in an imaginary European country. It never got better than this - short stories set in the "triune monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania" in the decades before the World Wars.

Jerrod Northi-rogue, pirate and a citizen of Pemath, was desperate enough to want to go through the transformation. It cost 100,000 units for the Craftsmen to endow him with the Seven Signs - a rather steep price even for him. But he would pay it somehow, for since the attack of the deadly leeris, he feared that the cost of missing this opportunity to find a refuge in the land of Tarnis would be even higher.

In The Boy King’s Tale, two entwined love stories, young and old, lead to betrayal, murder and the near overthrow of a kingdom in this epic story of son and bride, mother and lover, in the extraordinary true story adventure of the earliest days of one of England’s most revered kings, Edward III.

Geneva, 1688. Jeanne is barely scraping by on meager earnings from weaving. She dreams of her previous life as a wealthy merchant’s wife before Louis XIV’s soldiers ran her family out of France for refusing to renounce their faith. But even in Geneva, Jeanne and her son aren’t anywhere close to free from persecution. Jacob hopes his letters make it to Jeanne from the other side of the ocean. As he bides his time as an indentured servant on a Caribbean plantation, tragedy strikes in the form of shipwreck and pirates.

An embattled prime minister is handed an unexpected solution to all her country's problems.

Ten years ago, the Starsingers - tyrannical magicians who draw their power from the stars - suffered a brutal defeat at the hands of an ancient order of magic-resistant peacekeepers. Their rebellion quelled, their magic controlled, the five families of starlight magicians have been forced to live in a fragile truce with the starless commoners...until now. When an assassin begins killing Starsingers, the defiant peacekeepers are blamed, for who else could slay a magician? As another war approaches, Ezai and Ahryn form an unlikely alliance.

A world of living legend, peopled by centaurs, golems, harpies, and primitive but shrewd humans - all this in a mysterious realm of Starflux and Earthflux, closer to the primordial chaos than the world we know and told in a style at once familiar and fantastic, homely and horrific.

Avram Davidson was widely regarded as one of the most outstanding authors of short fantasy fiction in our time. This collection comprises his distinctive historical fantasies - tales of strange Mitteleurpoas, of magic in Victorian England, and on the American frontier. Here are "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire", "Traveller from an Antique Land", and "What Strange Stars and Skies"; here are dragons, cameras, and "The Singular Incident of the Dog on the Beach".

Journey to the exotic South Sea island of Bali, a magical land of dark jungles, of ancient gods, and terrifying demons! Madai lives in Bali and dreams of life beyond his island paradise. Yet, his wildest dream could not prepare him for the odyssey that lies ahead after he finds a moonstone amulet that introduces him to the spirit world.

New York, 1689. Jacob Delpech thinks day and night about his wife and child. He's determined to reunite with his family in London, but New York’s brutal winter deep-freeze has ruined his carefully laid plans. With transport across the Atlantic at a standstill and European politics on the verge of upheaval, his chances of ever making it home grow slimmer by the day. Snowbound in Switzerland, Jeanne Delpech’s heart aches for a loving reunion with her husband. To make it back to London, she and her son must travel across extremely treacherous terrain.

The Late Bronze Age Near East (c. 1500-1200 BCE) was a time and place where great kingdoms and empires vied for land and influence, playing high stakes diplomatic games, trading, and occasionally going to war with each other in the process. The Egyptians, Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians, and several smaller Canaanite kingdoms were all part of this system, which was one of the first true “global” systems in world history and also one of the most materially prosperous eras in antiquity.

Ever felt that awful rush of dread as you turn out the lights after a late-night horror film? Ever wondered if something is following you up the stairs when you go to bed? No? Well, you will after this....   

Peregrine, bastard son of King Paladrine, thought he had trouble when he was transformed by a sorcerer into a falcon. In fact, his real troubles began when the prepubescent princess Ruby changed him back into...well, almost a prince. A bastard. Whereupon he found himself dragged off by a dyspeptic dragon, smooched by a sphinx, wooed by the weefolk, and finally appointed Sub-Imperial-sub-Legate, which is still not quite a prince, but somewhat more elegant than a bastard.

Peregrine was the bastard son of the King of Sapodilla, the last Pagan kingdom in the world to resist Christianity. Accompanied by his page and the rather time-worn sorcerer, Appledore, the prince sallies forth into the Dark Ages to find his fortune. What he finds instead is: dragons, whores, Huns, Roman legions, emperors, and a most fantastic collection of mysteries and adventures.

Set during the reign of the Aztecs in Mexico, two alien forces, dormant for centuries, enter a confrontation on a remote mountain that will decide Earth's fate. The great old ones benevolently ruled before the cruel Aztecs were shaped by the Huitzil, who came from the evil stars and taught the Aztecs how to conquer and demanded endless human sacrifice.

Rond and his crew had been left to die slowly on an unknown planet. As they moved warily through the alien forest they heard the eerie rhythms coming toward them. Then they saw the grotesque figures. A bizarre army of screaming women! Masked, brandishing gleaming swords, rattling their terrible death drums, howling with the fury of some primitive blood lust - and they were attacking! As the scarlet waves of growling women approached, Rond and his men began to run - back into the dark forest of looming horror...

The Maze is a pathway between worlds and times. Its Masters know the secret but decline to interfere. Its Guardians at different levels prevent invasion of one world by the inhabitants of another. But the alien hive-creatures called Chulpex mean to find their way past the Guardians to colonize a new world, and one ordinary, untrained Earthman is catapulted into wild adventure in his determination to stop them.