Narrator

Peter Kenny

Peter Kenny
  • What if you held the power of a god, but you couldn’t control it?

    Annev has avoided one fate. But a darker path may still claim him . . .

    After surviving the destruction of Chaenbalu, new mysteries and greater threats await Annev and his friends in the capital city of Luqura. As they navigate the city’s perilous streets, Annev searches for a way to control his nascent magic and remove the cursed artifact now fused to his body.

    But what might removing it cost him?

    As Annev grapples with his magic, Fyn joins forces with old enemies and new allies, waging a secret war against Luqura’s corrupt guilds in the hopes of forging his own criminal empire. Deep in the Brakewood, Myjun is learning new skills of her own as apprentice to Oyru, the shadow assassin who attacked the village of Chaenbalu—but the power of revenge comes at a daunting price. And back in Chaenbalu itself, left for dead in the Academy’s ruins, Kenton seeks salvation in the only place he can: the power hoarded in the Vault of Damnation . . .

  • A wickedly witty field guide to bookstore customers by the curmudgeonly shop owner and author of Confessions of a Bookseller. Shaun Bythell knows them all—from the “Person Who Doesn’t Know What They Want (But Thinks It Might Have a Blue Cover)” to the “Parents Secretly after Free Childcare.” The business of books has never been funnier.

    In a tradition that runs from R. M. Williamson’s Bits from an Old Bookshop in 1904 to Jen Campbell’s Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops in 2012 (with George Orwell’s 1936 Bookshop Memories in between), here is the latest and perhaps most complete attempt to classify people who shop in bookstores. It does take all kinds.

    Employing something like Linnaean taxonomic groups, there’s the Expert (divided into subspecies from the Bore to the Helpful Person), the Young Family (ranging from the Exhausted to the Aspirational), Occultists (from Conspiracy Theorist to Craft Woman).

    Then there’s the Loiterer (including the Erotica Browser and the Self-Published Author), the Bearded Pensioner (including the Lycra Clad), the The Not-So-Silent Traveler (the Whistler, Sniffer, Hummer, Farter, and Tutter), and the Family Historian (generally Canadians who come to Shaun’s shop in Wigtown, Scotland).

    Two bonus sections include Staff and, finally, Perfect Customer—all add up to the funniest sell-and-tell in the house of books.

  • This book is the next best thing to visiting your favorite bookstorebookshop cat not included.

    Go behind the scenes at The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland, with owner Shaun Bythell. Inside a Georgian townhouse with a stone façade on the Wigtown highroad, jammed with more than 100,000 books and one portly shop cat, Shaun manages the daily ups and downs of running Scotland’s largest used bookshop with a sharp eye and even sharper wit. His account of one year behind the counter is something no book lover should miss.

  • You’ve heard the story before: an orphaned boy, raised by a wise old man, comes to a fuller knowledge of his magic and uses it to fight the great evil threatening his world.

    But what if that hero were destined to become the new dark lord?

    The Academy of Chaenbalu has stood against magic for centuries. Hidden from the world, acting from the shadows, it trains its students to detect and retrieve magic artifacts, which it jealously guards from the misuse of others. Because magic is dangerous: something that heals can also harm, and a power that aids one person may destroy another.

    Of the academy’s many students, only the most skilled can become avatars—warrior thieves, capable of infiltrating the most heavily guarded vaults—and only the most determined can be trusted to resist the lure of magic. More than anything, Annev de Breth wants to become one of them.

    But Annev carries a secret. Unlike his classmates who were stolen as infants from the capital city, Annev was born in the village of Chaenbalu, was believed to be executed, and then unknowingly raised by his parents’ killers. Seventeen years later, he struggles with the burdens of a forbidden magic, a forgotten heritage, and a secret deformity. When Annev is subsequently caught between the warring ideologies of his priestly mentor and the Academy’s masters, he must finally decide whether to accept the truth of who he really is … or embrace the darker truth of what he may one day become.

  • Stewart Gilmour is back in Stonemouth. After five years, in exile his presence is required at the funeral of patriarch Joe Murston, and even though the last time Stu saw the Murstons he was running for his life, staying away might be even more dangerous than turning up. An estuary town north of Aberdeen, Stonemouth, with its five-mile beach, can be beautiful on a sunny day. On a bleak one it can seem to offer little more than sea fog, gangsters, cheap drugs, and a suspension bridge irresistible to suicides.

    And although there is supposed to be a temporary truce between Stewart and the town's biggest crime family, it's soon clear that only Stewart is taking this promise of peace seriously. Before long a quick drop into the cold grey Stoun begins to look like the soft option, and as he steps back into the minefield of his past to confront his guilt and all that it has lost him, Stu uncovers ever darker stories and his homecoming takes a more lethal turn than even he had anticipated.

    Tough, funny, fast-paced and touching, Stonemouth cracks open adolescence, love, brotherhood, and vengeance in a rite of passage novel like no other.