Search Worlds Without End

Can a story save your life?

Meg Carpenter is broke. Her novel is years overdue. Her cell phone is out of minutes. And her moody boyfriend's only contribution to the household is his sour attitude. So she jumps at the chance to review a pseudoscientific book that promises life everlasting.

But who wants to live forever?

Consulting cosmology and physics, tarot cards, koans (and riddles and jokes), new-age theories of everything, narrative theory, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and knitting patterns, Meg wends her way through Our Tragic Universe, asking this and many other questions. Does she believe in fairies? In magic? Is she a superbeing? Is she living a storyless story? And what's the connection between her off-hand suggestion to push a car into a river, a ship in a bottle, a mysterious beast loose on the moor, and the controversial author of The Science of Living Forever?

Smart, entrancing, and boiling over with Thomas's trademark big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, how we can rewrite our futures (if not our histories), and how stories just might save our lives.

A cursed book. A missing professor. Some nefarious men in gray suits. And a dreamworld called the Troposphere?

Ariel Manto has a fascination with nineteenth-century scientists — especially Thomas Lumas and The End of Mr. Y, a book no one alive has read. When she mysteriously uncovers a copy at a used bookstore, Ariel is launched into an adventure of science and faith, consciousness and death, space and time, and everything in between.

Seeking answers, Ariel follows in Mr. Y's footsteps: She swallows a tincture, stares into a black dot, and is transported into the Troposphere — a wonderland where she can travel through time and space using the thoughts of others. There she begins to understand all the mysteries surrounding the book, herself, and the universe. Or is it all just a hallucination?

With The End of Mr. Y, Scarlett Thomas brings us another fast-paced mix of popular culture, love, mystery, and irresistible philosophical adventure.

Great Aunt Oleander is dead. To each of her nearest and dearest she has left a seed pod. The seed pods might be deadly, but then again they might also contain the secret of enlightenment. Not that anyone has much time for enlightenment. Fleur, left behind at the crumbling Namaste House, must step into Oleander's role as guru to lost and lonely celebrities. Bryony wants to lose the weight she put on after her botanist parents disappeared, but can't stop drinking. And Charlie struggles to make sense of his life after losing the one woman he could truly love.

A complex and fiercely contemporary tale of inheritance, enlightenment, life, death, desire and family trees, The Seed Collectors is the most important novel yet from one of the world's most daring and brilliant writers. As Henry James said of George Eliot's Middlemarch, The Seed Collectors is a 'treasurehouse of detail' revealing all that it means to be connected, to be part of a society, to be part of the universe and to be human.

Effie Truelove believes in magic, as does her grandfather Griffin (although he refuses to do any magic, let alone teach Effie how to use it). After a mysterious incident leaves Griffin close to death, Effie is given an unusual silver ring and told she must look after her grandfather's library of rare and powerful books. But then the books fall into the hands of shady scholar Leonard Levar, and Effie is propelled into the most dangerous adventure of her life.

Now, Effie and her friends--nerdy Maximilian, rugby-mad Wolf, helpful Lexy, and eccentric Raven--must discover their true powers if they are to get the books back. And Effie alone will have to travel to the Otherworld, where she will uncover the true meaning of the strange old book called Dragon's Green...

Effie Truelove has just been expelled from magic class and now she can't even get back to the Otherworld--the place she most loves and where she feels she belongs. If she can find a copy of The Chosen Ones by Laurel Wilde to give her father then she might be able to fix everything.

The only problem is that there are suddenly no copies of the book anywhere, because Albion Freake, the richest man in the world, is paying for them to be destroyed so that he can own the single-volume limited edition that publisher Skylurian Midzhar is making for him.

Raven Wilde's witch's intuition tells her there's something suspicious about Skykurian's plan, but she's not sure what it is.

And Maximilian has somehow managed to go missing deep in Napoleonic Europe.

Will the five friends from Dragon's Green--Effie, Raven, Maximilian, Lexy, and Wolf--be able to combine their skills again to save the world from the Diberi? And can they get away from Terrence Deer-Hart, the children's author who seems a bit too interested in Effie's life?

Effie Truelove and her school friends Lexy, Wolf, Maximilian, and Raven must put their magical skills to the test. The Diberi, a corrupt organization intent on destroying the world, has returned and has something sinister planned at Midwinter.

But during a visit to the Otherworld, Effie is mistaken and imprisoned for being a galloglass--a dangerous, selfish islander. Meanwhile, Lexy is threatened by the vile professor Jupiter Peacock and Wolf embarks on a perilous journey to find his missing sister.

And back at school, Neptune the cat is bored. He's used to lording over the other stray cats, but they've all mysteriously vanished. Where could they be--and how will he find them?

Can Effie and her friends reunite before their universe ceases to exist?