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The Other Wind (The Earthsea Cycle) by Ursula K. Le Guin from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is $1.55

Book Description:

The sorcerer Alder fears sleep. He dreams of the land of death, of his wife who died young and longs to return to him so much that she kissed him across the low stone wall that separates our world from the Dry Land-where the grass is withered, the stars never move, and lovers pass without knowing each other. The dead are pulling Alder to them at night. Through him they may free themselves and invade Earthsea.

Alder seeks advice from Ged, once Archmage. Ged tells him to go to Tenar, Tehanu, and the young king at Havnor. They are joined by amber-eyed Irian, a fierce dragon able to assume the shape of a woman.

The threat can be confronted only in the Immanent Grove on Roke, the holiest place in the world and there the king, hero, sage, wizard, and dragon make a last stand.

Le Guin combines her magical fantasy with a profoundly human, earthly, humble touch.

Tales from Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle) by Ursula K. Le Guin from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is $1.42

Book Description:

The tales of this book, as Ursula K. Le Guin writes in her introduction, explore or extend the world established by her first four Earthsea novels. Yet each stands on its own.

“The Finder,” a novella set a few hundred years before A Wizard of Earthsea, presents a dark and troubled Archipelago and shows how some of its customs and institutions came to be. “The Bones of the Earth” features the wizards who taught the wizard who first taught Ged and demonstrates how humility, if great enough, can contend with an earthquake. “Darkrose and Diamond” is a delightful story of young courtship showing that wizards sometimes pursue alternative careers. “On the High Marsh” tells of the love of power-and of the power of love. “Dragonfly” shows how a determined woman can break the glass ceiling of male magedom.

Concluding with an account of Earthsea’s history, people, languages, literature, and magic, this collection also features two new maps of Earthsea.

This ebook includes a sample chapter of THE OTHER WIND.

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters from Quirk Books is $2.99

Book Description:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2012

What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway?

Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact.

The Last Policeman presents a fascinating portrait of a pre-apocalyptic United States. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.

The first in a trilogy, The Last Policeman offers a mystery set on the brink of an apocalypse. As Palace’s investigation plays out under the shadow of 2011GV1, we’re confronted by hard questions way beyond “whodunit.” What basis does civilization rest upon? What is life worth? What would any of us do, what would we really do, if our days were numbered?

Gone by Mo Hayder from Atlantic Monthly Press is $3.60

Book Description:

Praised as a “maestro of the sinister” by the New York Daily News, Mo Hayder delivers her most suspenseful novel to date. By turns thrilling and horrifying, Gone follows the investigation of a brilliant and twisted carjacker with a disturbing game to play.

Jack Caffery’s newest case seems like a routine carjacking, a crime he’s seen plenty of times before. But as the hours tick by and his investigation morphs into a nightmare, he realizes the sickening truth: the thief wasn’t after the car, but the eleven-year-old girl in the backseat. Meanwhile police diver Sergeant Flea Marley is pursuing her own theory of the case, and what she finds in an abandoned, half-submerged tunnel could put her in grave danger. The carjacker is always a step ahead of the Major Crime Investigation Unit, toying with their minds in taunting letters and ready to strike again. As the chances for his victims grow slimmer, Jack and Flea race to fit the pieces together in time.

Gone is Mo Hayder at her terrifying best. Each dark and captivating twist reveals a new dimension to this tight-knight plot, burrowing deeper into the chilling and clever world Mo Hayder creates.

I Dream of Genies by Judi Fennell from Sourcebooks Casablanca is $2.91

Book Description:

He needs to change his luck, and fast!

Matt Ewing would gladly hunt down a fortune in lucky pennies if he thought it would help save his business. But for all his hoping, Matt’s clueless when his long-awaited lucky charm falls in his lap in the form of a beguiling genie. He just can’t believe that this beautiful woman could be the answer to his prayers…

She’s been bottled up for far too long!

Spending 2,000 years in a bottle would make any woman a little stir-crazy. So when Matt releases Eden from her luxurious captivity, she’s thrilled to repay him by giving him the magical boost he needs…

But for all her good intentions, Eden’s magical prowess is a little rusty and her magical mistakes become more than embarrassing. And though Eden knows falling in love will end her magic and immortality, she can’t help but be drawn to the one man who wants her just for herself…

Lucky Jim (New York Review Books Classics) by Kingsley Amis from NYRB Classics is $2.99

Book Description:

Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954.

This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics, with each of whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.

More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy post-war manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom, whatever form they may take, and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh. As Christopher Hitchens has written, “if you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.”

The Absolutist by John Boyne from Other Press is $3.00

Book Description:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2012

A masterfully told tale of passion, jealousy, heroism and betrayal set in the gruesome trenches of World War I.

It is September 1919: twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver a package of letters to the sister of Will Bancroft, the man he fought alongside during the Great War.

But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan’s visit. He can no longer keep a secret and has finally found the courage to unburden himself of it. As Tristan recounts the horrific details of what to him became a senseless war, he also speaks of his friendship with Will–from their first meeting on the training grounds at Aldershot to their farewell in the trenches of northern France. The intensity of their bond brought Tristan happiness and self-discovery as well as confusion and unbearable pain.

The Absolutist is a masterful tale of passion, jealousy, heroism, and betrayal set in one of the most gruesome trenches of France during World War I. This novel will keep readers on the edge of their seats until its most extraordinary and unexpected conclusion, and will stay with them long after they’ve turned the last page.

Life Among Giants: A Novel by Bill Roorbach from Algonquin Books is $4.99

Book Description:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2012

At seventeen, David “Lizard” Hochmeyer is nearly seven feet tall, a star quarterback, and Princeton-bound. His future seems all but assured until his parents are mysteriously murdered, leaving Lizard and his older sister, Kate, adrift and alone. Sylphide, the world’s greatest ballerina, lives across the pond from their Connecticut home, in a mansion the size of a museum, and it turns out that her rock star husband’s own disasters have intersected with Lizard’s—and Kate’s—in the most intimate and surprising ways.

Over the decades that follow, Lizard and Kate are obsessed with uncovering the motives behind the deaths, returning time and again to their father’s missing briefcase, his shady business dealings and shaky finances, and to Sylphide, who has threaded her way into Lizard’s and Kate’s lives much more deeply than either had ever realized. From the football fields of Princeton to a stint with the NFL, from elaborate dances at the mansion to the seductions lying in wait for Lizard, and ultimately to the upscale restaurant he opens in his hometown, it only takes Lizard a lifetime to piece it all together.

A wildly entertaining novel of murder, seduction, and revenge—rich in incident, in expansiveness of character, and in lavishness of setting—it’s a Gatsby-esque adventure, a larger-than-life quest for answers that reveals how sometimes the greatest mystery lies in knowing one’s own heart.

Hitler’s Last Secretary: A Firsthand Account of Life with Hitler by Traudl Junge from Arcade Publishing is $1.99

Book Description:

Hitler’s personal secretary reveals the experience of day-to-day life beside one of history’s true monsters.

In 1942 Germany, Traudl Junge was a young woman with dreams of becoming a ballerina when she was offered the chance of a lifetime. At the age of twenty-two she became private secretary to Adolf Hitler and served him for two and a half years, right up to the bitter end. Junge observed the intimate workings of Hitler’s administration, she typed correspondence and speeches, including Hitler’s public and private last will and testament; she ate her meals and spent evenings with him; and she was close enough to hear the bomb that was intended to assassinate Hitler in the Wolf’s Lair, close enough to smell the bitter almond odor of Eva Braun’s cyanide pill.

In her intimate, detailed memoir, Junge invites readers to experience day-to-day life with the most horrible dictator of the twentieth century. 14 black-and-white photographs

The Omicron Legion (Blaine McCracken) by Jon Land from Open Road is $2.99

Book Description:

A mysterious league of elite assassins targets ninety-six of the most powerful people in America, and Blaine McCracken must stop them before the murderers bring the country to its knees

There are ninety-six names on the list. They are those of businessmen, judges, and senators—the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful. And they are all going to die. A man named Takahashi has hired the world’s finest assassins to eliminate these men in secrecy and style, crossing names off the list without raising any suspicion. And they are killing ahead of schedule.

But someone has noticed the pattern of these seemingly unrelated deaths, and she knows enough to call Blaine McCracken. Takahashi didn’t consider the rogue American agent, and that is a grave mistake. His carefully orchestrated vendetta is just the sort of thing that McCracken lives to upset. He has made a career teaching lessons to those who underestimate him, and Takahashi’s league of assassins is next.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jon Land including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.