Synopsis:
"From the small coastal town of Senjan, notorious for its pirates, a
young woman sets out to find vengeance for her lost family. That same
spring, from the wealthy city-state of Seressa, famous for its canals
and lagoon, come two very different people: a young artist traveling to
the dangerous east to paint the grand khalif at his request—and possibly
to do more—and a fiercely intelligent, angry woman, posing as a
doctor’s wife, but sent by Seressa as a spy.
The trading ship
that carries them is commanded by the accomplished younger son of a
merchant family, ambivalent about the life he’s been born to live. And
farther east a boy trains to become a soldier in the elite infantry of
the khalif—to win glory in the war everyone knows is coming.
As these lives entwine, their fates—and those of many others—will hang
in the balance, when the khalif sends out his massive army to take the
great fortress that is the gateway to the western world..."
Synopsis:
"Anna Francis lives in a tall old house with her father and her doll
Penelope. She is a refugee, a piece of flotsam washed up in England by
the tides of the Great War and the chaos that trailed in its wake. Once
upon a time, she had a mother and a brother, and they all lived together
in the most beautiful city in the world, by the shores of Homer’s
wine-dark sea.
But that is all gone now, and only to her doll does
she ever speak of it, because her father cannot bear to hear. She sits
in the shadows of the tall house and watches the rain on the windows,
creating worlds for herself to fill out the loneliness. The house
becomes her own little kingdom, an island full of dreams and
halfforgotten memories. And then one winter day, she finds an interloper
in the topmost, dustiest attic of the house. A boy named Luca with
yellow eyes, who is as alone in the world as she is.
That day, she’ll lose everything in her life, and find the only real friend she may ever know."
(Debut novel)
Synopsis:
"Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the
custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he
can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor
in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which
also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.
The
world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to
our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a
hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also
on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and
speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly
taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is
affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless
economic and cultural competion is carefully managed by central planners
of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of
heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life."
(Debut novel)
Synopsis:
"The core story is set in Venice in the sixteenth century, when the
famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world's
most wondrous inventions: the mirror. An object of glittering yet
fearful fascination
—was it reflecting simple reality, or something more spiritually revealing?
—the
Venetian mirrors were state of the art technology, and subject to
industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide. But for
any of the development team to leave the island was a crime punishable
by death. One man, however
—a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose
—has a scheme he thinks will allow him to outwit the city's terrifying enforcers of the edict, the ominous Council of Ten . . .
Meanwhile, in two other Venices
—Venice Beach, California, circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today
—two other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret . . ."
(Story collection/mosaic novel)
Synopsis:
"A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot
of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality.
The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap,
and data is cheaper.
When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from
Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar
child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a
finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik—a damaged cyborg
soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is
terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted
data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.
Rising
above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all
things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and
the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of
poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien
entities who, through the Conversation—a shifting, flowing stream of
consciousness—are just the beginning of irrevocable change.
At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive...and even evolve."
