Search Worlds Without End

In 1997, a runaway teenager and her yellow toy robot travel west through a strange USA. The ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside, heaped together with the discarded trash of a high tech consumerist society in decline. As their car approaches the edge of the continent, the world outside the window seems to be unraveling ever faster--as if somewhere beyond the horizon, the hollow core of civilization has finally caved in.

Simon Stålenhag is the internationally acclaimed author, concept designer, and artist behind Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood. His highly imaginative images and stories depicting illusive sci-fi phenomena in mundane, hyper-realistic Scandinavian landscapes have made Stålenhag one of the most sought-after visual storytellers in the world. In The Electric State, Stålenhag turns his unique vision to America.

The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

THE SEPARATION is the story of twin brothers. Rowers in the 1936 Olympics, they meet Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy; one joins the RAF, and captains a Wellington; he is shot down after a bombing raid on Hamburg and becomes Churchill's aide-de-camp; his twin brother, a pacifist, works with the Red Cross, rescuing bombing victims in London. But this is not a straightforward story of the Second World War: this is an alternate history: the two brothers - both called J.L. Sawyer - live their lives in alternate versions of reality.

In one, the Second World War ends as we imagine it did; in the other, thanks to efforts of an eminent team of negotiators headed by Hess, the war ends in 1941. THE SEPARATION is an emotionally riveting story of how ordinary people can make a difference; it's a savage critique of Winston Churchill, the man credited as the saviour of Britain and the Western World, and it's a story of how one perceives and shapes the past.

The Washington Territory, 1873. The woman who appeared without warning in the forest clearing was small, dressed all in black, and of indeterminate age. Her hair was cropped and she was babbling in some incomprehensible tongue. Chin Ah Kin thought she might be a ghost-lover--an immortal sent by the gods to enchant him. His more practical uncle thought otherwise: a white woman in a Chinese railway workers' camp could only be trouble. He ordered Chin to return her to her white world.

Thus begins Sarah Canary, Karen Joy Fowler's bewitching odyssey of the Old West that speaks across a hundred years of American experience. As Sarah Canary and her raging entourage move across the green landscape of the Pacific Northwest, each new encounter with America's boisterous frontier offers intriguing insights into the extravagant myths and legends of the past which have evolved into the pillars of our national heritage. Part adventure story, part history lesson, part flight of marvelous fantasy, Sarah Canary achieves that true rarity of excellence: a novel of ideas and wit that can raise tears as well as laughter.