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万本电子书0元读

Hidden Figures
Hidden Figures
Margot Lee Shetterly
¥100.71
The #1 New York Times bestsellerThe phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner. Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Even as Virginia’s Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens. Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future.?
Odoo 10 Development Essentials
Odoo 10 Development Essentials
Daniel Reis
¥80.65
Fast-track your development skills to build powerful Odoo 10 business applications About This Book Get the most up-to-date guide on Odoo 10 and learn how to build excellent business applications with Odoo This example-rich, easy-to-follow guide enables you to build apps appropriate to your business needs Create solid business applications with the help of this precise, to-the-point guide Who This Book Is For This book caters to developers who are familiar with Python and MVC design and now want to build effective business applications using Odoo. What You Will Learn Install Odoo from source code and use all the basic techniques to setup and manage your Odoo server instances Create your first Odoo application Add Odoo's social and messaging features to your own modules Get to know the essentials of Models and Views Understand and use the server API to add business logic Use Qweb to create custom Reports Extend Odoo CMS features to create your own website controllers and pages Leverage Odoo Workflows on your applications Write module automated tests and debugging techniques Deploy your Odoo applications for production use In Detail Odoo is one of the fastest growing open source, business application development software products available. With announcement of Odoo 10, there are many new features added to Odoo and the face of business applications developed with Odoo has changed. This book will not only teach you how to build and customize business applications with Odoo, but it also covers all the new features that Odoo has to offer. This book is the latest resource on developing and customizing Odoo 10 applications. It comes packed with much more and refined content than its predecessor. It will start with building business applications from scratch and will cover topics such as module extensions, inheritance, working with data, user interfaces, and so on. The book also covers the latest features of Odoo 10, in addition to front end development, testing and debugging techniques. The book will also talk about Odoo Community and Odoo Enterprise. Style and approach This book follows a step-by-step practical approach where you will learn new concepts with every progressing chapter and create apps for business development.
Denial [Movie Tie-in]
Denial [Movie Tie-in]
Deborah E. Lipstadt
¥88.56
In her acclaimed 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt called David Irving, a prolific writer of books on World War II, “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial.” The following year, after Lipstadt’s book was published in the United Kingdom, Irving led a libel suit against Lipstadt and her publisher. She prepared her defense with the help of a first-rate team of solicitors, historians, and experts, and a dramatic trial unfolded.Denial, previously published as History on Trial, is Lipstadt’s riveting, blow- by-blow account of this singular legal battle, which resulted in a formal denunciation of a Holocaust denier that crippled the movement for years to come. Lipstadt’s victory was proclaimed on the front page of major news- papers around the world, such as The Times (UK), which declared that “history has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory.”
Art of the Film: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Art of the Film: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Dermot Power
¥279.90
Step inside the world of the talented art departments who, led by Academy Award?-winning production designer Stuart Craig, were responsible for the creation of the unforgettable characters, locations and beasts from the eagerly anticipated new adventure in J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World.The Art of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, edited by Dermot Power, concept artist on the film, takes you on a magical journey through a design process every bit as wonderful as that encountered by Newt Scamander in the wizarding world: from the earliest gatherings of the artists, designers and filmmakers to the magical time of the film’s production itself at Leavesden Studios.Bursting with hundreds of production paintings, concept sketches, storyboards, blueprints and matte paintings, and filled with unique insights about the filmmaking journey from Stuart Craig and the artists themselves, this superb book – officially licensed by Warner Bros. Consumer Products – presents a visual feast for readers, and will welcome fans of Harry Potter films into the world of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
F# 4.0 Design Patterns
F# 4.0 Design Patterns
Gene Belitski
¥80.65
Learn how to apply functional F# design patterns to a huge range of programming challenges, and discover a smart route to building better applications About This Book This book provides a path if you are coming from imperative and object-oriented paradigms It will take you to an intermediate level of functional programming in very practical manner to write enterprise-quality idiomatic F# code Tackle complex computing problems with simple code by fully embracing the functional-first F# paradigm Packed full of practical coding examples to help you master F# programming and author optimal code Who This Book Is For This book is for .NET developers, web programmers, C# developers, and F# developers. So, if you have basic experience in F# programming and developing performance-critical applications, then this book is for you. What You Will Learn Acquire the practical knowledge to use the main functional design patterns Realign some imperative and object-oriented principles under the functional approach Develop your confidence in building and combining first-order and higher-order functions Learn to use core language pattern matching effectively Make use of native F# algebraic data types in place of custom-built classes Recognize and measure the difference in resource consumption between sequences and materialized data collections Navigate and use F# Core libraries with ease by seeing patterns behind specific library functions Master writing generic polymorphic code In Detail Following design patterns is a well-known approach to writing better programs that captures and reuses high-level abstractions that are common in many applications. This book will encourage you to develop an idiomatic F# coding skillset by fully embracing the functional-first F# paradigm. It will also help you harness this powerful instrument to write succinct, bug-free, and cross-platform code. F# 4.0 Design Patterns will start off by helping you develop a functional way of thinking. We will show you how beneficial the functional-first paradigm is and how to use it to get the optimum results. The book will help you acquire the practical knowledge of the main functional design patterns, the relationship of which with the traditional Gang of Four set is not straightforward. We will take you through pattern matching, immutable data types, and sequences in F#. We will also uncover advanced functional patterns, look at polymorphic functions, typical data crunching techniques, adjusting code through augmentation, and generalization. Lastly, we will take a look at the advanced techniques to equip you with everything you need to write flawless code. Style and approach This book will teach you how to write F# code in an idiomatic functional-first manner, thereby improving the productivity of F# programmers. This book is ideal for an F# programmer who wants using F# in functional-first way.
Deep Learning with Hadoop
Deep Learning with Hadoop
Dipayan Dev
¥71.93
Build, implement and scale distributed deep learning models for large-scale datasets About This Book Get to grips with the deep learning concepts and set up Hadoop to put them to use Implement and parallelize deep learning models on Hadoop’s YARN framework A comprehensive tutorial to distributed deep learning with Hadoop Who This Book Is For If you are a data scientist who wants to learn how to perform deep learning on Hadoop, this is the book for you. Knowledge of the basic machine learning concepts and some understanding of Hadoop is required to make the best use of this book. What You Will Learn Explore Deep Learning and various models associated with it Understand the challenges of implementing distributed deep learning with Hadoop and how to overcome it Implement Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with deeplearning4j Delve into the implementation of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) Understand the mathematical explanation for implementing Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) Get hands on practice of deep learning and their implementation with Hadoop. In Detail This book will teach you how to deploy large-scale dataset in deep neural networks with Hadoop for optimal performance. Starting with understanding what deep learning is, and what the various models associated with deep neural networks are, this book will then show you how to set up the Hadoop environment for deep learning. In this book, you will also learn how to overcome the challenges that you face while implementing distributed deep learning with large-scale unstructured datasets. The book will also show you how you can implement and parallelize the widely used deep learning models such as Deep Belief Networks, Convolutional Neural Networks, Recurrent Neural Networks, Restricted Boltzmann Machines and autoencoder using the popular deep learning library deeplearning4j. Get in-depth mathematical explanations and visual representations to help you understand the design and implementations of Recurrent Neural network and Denoising AutoEncoders with deeplearning4j. To give you a more practical perspective, the book will also teach you the implementation of large-scale video processing, image processing and natural language processing on Hadoop. By the end of this book, you will know how to deploy various deep neural networks in distributed systems using Hadoop. Style and approach This book takes a comprehensive, step-by-step approach to implement efficient deep learning models on Hadoop. It starts from the basics and builds the readers’ knowledge as they strengthen their understanding of the concepts. Practical examples are included in every step of the way to supplement the theory.
Learning PowerCLI - Second Edition
Learning PowerCLI - Second Edition
Robert van den Nieuwendijk
¥90.46
Learn to leverage the power of PowerCLI to automate your VMware vSphere environment with ease About This Book This is first book on the market that will enlighten you on the latest version of PowerCLI and how to implement it Effectively manage virtual machines, networks, and reports with the latest features of PowerCLI A comprehensive and practical book on automating VMware vSphere Who This Book Is For This book is ideal for you if you want to learn how to automate your VMware vSphere or vCloud infrastructure by getting the most out of PowerCLI. It’s assumed that you have some experience in administrating a vSphere or vCloud environment. Knowledge of Microsoft’s Windows PowerShell is not a prerequisite. What You Will Learn Explore PowerShell and PowerCLI cmdlets and their output objects See how to manage virtual machines and work with virtual networks Manage vCloud Director from PowerCLI Use Site Recovery Manager from PowerCLI to create a disaster recovery solution Manage NSX and vRealize Automation using REST API with PowerCLI Create and configure vSphere HA and DRS clusters Use vSphere Update Manager with PowerCLI to create patch baselines and scan hosts Explore reporting techniques to retrieve log files In Detail VMware vSphere PowerCLI, a free extension to Microsoft Windows PowerShell, enables you to automate the management of a VMware vSphere or vCloud environment. This book will show you how to automate your tasks and make your job easier. Starting with an introduction to the basics of PowerCLI, the book will teach you how to manage your vSphere and vCloud infrastructure from the command line. To help you manage a vSphere host overall, you will learn how to manage vSphere ESXi hosts, host profiles, host services, host firewall, and deploy and upgrade ESXi hosts using Image Builder and Auto Deploy. The next chapter will not only teach you how to create datastore and datastore clusters, but you’ll also work with profile-driven and policy-based storage to manage your storage. To create a disaster recovery solution and retrieve information from vRealize Operations, you will learn how to use Site Recovery Manager and vRealize Operations respectively. Towards the end, you’ll see how to use the REST APIs from PowerShell to manage NSX and vRealize Automation and create patch baselines, scan hosts against the baselines for missing patches, and re-mediate hosts. By the end of the book, you will be capable of using the best tool to automate the management and configuration of VMware vSphere. Style and approach This comprehensive book will teach system administrators everything about PowerCLI 6 and how to utilize it to automate VMware vSphere.
Microsoft System Center 2016 Service Manager Cookbook - Second Edition
Microsoft System Center 2016 Service Manager Cookbook - Second Edition
Anders Asp (MVP)
¥107.90
Discover over 100 practical recipes to help you master the art of IT service management for your organization About This Book Unleash the capabilities of Microsoft System Center 2016 Service Manager Master the skills of configuring, deploying, managing, and troubleshooting your Service Manager 2016 This book contains practical recipes that leverage the key and newly added features and functionalities of Microsoft System Center 2016 Service Manager Who This Book Is For This book will be useful to IT professionals including SCSM administrators who want to configure and administer System Center Service Manager 2016 and understand how to solve specific problems and scenarios that arise. It will also be useful to users of Service Manager 2012 who want to learn about the new features and capabilities of the Service Manager 2016 release. It will be ideal if you have Service Manager experience as well as experience with other System Center products. What You Will Learn See a practical implementation of the ITSM framework and processes based on ITIL Deploy and configure the new Service Manager HTML5 Self-Service Portal along with Service Catalog design and configuration Get to know about Incident, Problem, and Change Management processes and configuration Get to grips with performing advanced personalization in Service Manager Discover how to set up and use automation with and within Service Manager 2016 Work with Service Manager Data Warehouse Find out what Security Roles are and how to implement them Learn how to upgrade from SCSM 2012 R2 to SCSM 2016 In Detail System Center Service Manager (SCSM) is an integrated platform that offers a simplified data center management experience by implementing best practices such as Incident Management, Service Request, and Change Control to achieve efficient service delivery across your organization. This book provides you with real-world recipes that can be used immediately and will show you how to configure and administer SCSM 2016. You’ll also find out how to solve particular problems and scenarios to take this tool further. You’ll start with recipes on implementing ITSM frameworks and processes and configuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Then, you'll work through deploying and configuring the HTML5 Self-Service Portal, configuring Incident and Problem Management, and designing and configuring Change and Release Management. You'll also learn about security roles and overall Microsoft SCSM 2016 administration. Toward the end of the book, we’ll look at advanced topics, such as presenting the wealth of information stored within the Service Manager Data Warehouse, standardizing SCSM deployments, and implementing automation. Style and approach This book will enlighten you on Microsoft System Center 2016 Service Manager through recipes that can be implemented directly in any enterprise. You can read the book from start to end if you’re a beginner, or just open up any chapter and start following the recipes as a reference for advanced users. This book consists of a pool of step-by-step recipes on how to perform activities in Service Manager.
The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047
The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047
Lionel Shriver
¥62.59
‘Shriver’s intelligence, mordant humour and vicious leaps of imagination all combine to make this a novel that is as unsettling as it is entertaining’ FINANCIAL TIMES The brilliant new novel from the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk about Kevin. It is 2029. The Mandibles have been counting on a sizable fortune filtering down when their 97-year-old patriarch dies. Yet America’s soaring national debt has grown so enormous that it can never be repaid. Under siege from an upstart international currency, the dollar is in meltdown. A bloodless world war will wipe out the savings of millions of American families. Their inheritance turned to ash, each family member must contend with disappointment, but also – as the effects of the downturn start to hit – the challenge of sheer survival. Recently affluent Avery is petulant that she can’t buy olive oil, while her sister Florence is forced to absorb strays into her increasingly cramped household. As their father Carter fumes at having to care for his demented stepmother now that a nursing home is too expensive, his sister Nollie, an expat author, returns from abroad at 73 to a country that’s unrecognizable. Perhaps only Florence’s oddball teenage son Willing, an economics autodidact, can save this formerly august American family from the streets. This is not science fiction. This is a frightening, fascinating, scabrously funny glimpse into the decline that may await the United States all too soon, from the pen of perhaps the most consistently perceptive and topical author of our times.
Big Data Visualization
Big Data Visualization
James D. Miller
¥80.65
Learn effective tools and techniques to separate big data into manageable and logical components for efficient data visualization About This Book This unique guide teaches you how to visualize your cluttered, huge amounts of big data with ease It is rich with ample options and solid use cases for big data visualization, and is a must-have book for your shelf Improve your decision-making by visualizing your big data the right way Who This Book Is For This book is for data analysts or those with a basic knowledge of big data analysis who want to learn big data visualization in order to make their analysis more useful. You need sufficient knowledge of big data platform tools such as Hadoop and also some experience with programming languages such as R. This book will be great for those who are familiar with conventional data visualizations and now want to widen their horizon by exploring big data visualizations. What You Will Learn Understand how basic analytics is affected by big data Deep dive into effective and efficient ways of visualizing big data Get to know various approaches (using various technologies) to address the challenges of visualizing big data Comprehend the concepts and models used to visualize big data Know how to visualize big data in real time and for different use cases Understand how to integrate popular dashboard visualization tools such as Splunk and Tableau Get to know the value and process of integrating visual big data with BI tools such as Tableau Make sense of the visualization options for big data, based upon the best suited visualization techniques for big data In Detail When it comes to big data, regular data visualization tools with basic features become insufficient. This book covers the concepts and models used to visualize big data, with a focus on efficient visualizations. This book works around big data visualizations and the challenges around visualizing big data and address characteristic challenges of visualizing like speed in accessing, understanding/adding context to, improving the quality of the data, displaying results, outliers, and so on. We focus on the most popular libraries to execute the tasks of big data visualization and explore "big data oriented" tools such as Hadoop and Tableau. We will show you how data changes with different variables and for different use cases with step-through topics such as: importing data to something like Hadoop, basic analytics. The choice of visualizations depends on the most suited techniques for big data, and we will show you the various options for big data visualizations based upon industry-proven techniques. You will then learn how to integrate popular visualization tools with graphing databases to see how huge amounts of certain data. Finally, you will find out how to display the integration of visual big data with BI using Cognos BI. Style and approach With the help of insightful real-world use cases, we’ll tackle data in the world of big data. The scalability and hugeness of the data makes big data visualizations different from normal data visualizations, and this book addresses all the difficulties encountered by professionals while visualizing their big data.
ServiceNow Cookbook
ServiceNow Cookbook
Ashish Rudra Srivastava
¥80.65
Over 50 practical and immediately applicable recipes to help you manage services in your enterprise environment efficiently About This Book Solve problems and challenges encountered while implementing or using ServiceNow in your organization Helps you build core administration, management, and maintenance skills to automate and orchestrate your IT environment Comes with recipes to improve the way you design and create automated workflows Who This Book Is For This book targets IT professionals and administrators who have some experience of working with ServiceNow already and are looking to solve regular or unique problems that surface when using ServiceNow. It’s advisable to have a basic level of administration experience with ServiceNow. Familiarity with JavaScript is assumed. What You Will Learn Grasp the basics, such as entering and navigation, required to implement ServiceNow Perform core configuration and management tasks Use the ServiceNow plugins to manage development Build and publish custom applications for service management Design data-driven apps to connect with outside worlds by getting into Client and server *ing Configure alerts and notifications and understand e-mail troubleshooting and watermarking Build and configure reports to set up your dashboard as per the requirement Create and configure workflow activities In Detail ServiceNow is the ideal platform for you to create enterprise-level applications, giving borh requesters and fulfillers better visibility and access to a process. With this title we’ll guide you through the world of ServiceNow, letting you take on the best the platform offers you with the least amount of hassle. Starting with the core configuration and management tasks, this book will help you build data-driven apps and it will also explore development best practices. You will learn to set up email notifications for users and work with the database view for reporting. Next, the book will guide you through creating various tasks from the workflow and show you how to make the most of the workflow utilities available in ServiceNow. Finally, the book will drive you through the auditing and diagnosing aspects of ServiceNow. By the end of this book, you will acquire immediately applicable skills to rectify everyday problems encountered on the ServiceNow platform. Style and approach This book follows a recipe-based problem-solution approach to address and dispel challenges faced when implementing and using ServiceNow on a regular basis. It will act as a quick solution when trying to solve specific problems without having to read an exhaustive tutorial.
Natural Language Processing: Python and NLTK
Natural Language Processing: Python and NLTK
Nitin Hardeniya
¥152.59
Learn to build expert NLP and machine learning projects using NLTK and other Python libraries About This Book Break text down into its component parts for spelling correction, feature extraction, and phrase transformation Work through NLP concepts with simple and easy-to-follow programming recipes Gain insights into the current and budding research topics of NLP Who This Book Is For If you are an NLP or machine learning enthusiast and an intermediate Python programmer who wants to quickly master NLTK for natural language processing, then this Learning Path will do you a lot of good. Students of linguistics and semantic/sentiment analysis professionals will find it invaluable. What You Will Learn The scope of natural language complexity and how they are processed by machines Clean and wrangle text using tokenization and chunking to help you process data better Tokenize text into sentences and sentences into words Classify text and perform sentiment analysis Implement string matching algorithms and normalization techniques Understand and implement the concepts of information retrieval and text summarization Find out how to implement various NLP tasks in Python In Detail Natural Language Processing is a field of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence that deals with human-computer interaction. It provides a seamless interaction between computers and human beings and gives computers the ability to understand human speech with the help of machine learning. The number of human-computer interaction instances are increasing so it’s becoming imperative that computers comprehend all major natural languages. The first NLTK Essentials module is an introduction on how to build systems around NLP, with a focus on how to create a customized tokenizer and parser from scratch. You will learn essential concepts of NLP, be given practical insight into open source tool and libraries available in Python, shown how to analyze social media sites, and be given tools to deal with large scale text. This module also provides a workaround using some of the amazing capabilities of Python libraries such as NLTK, scikit-learn, pandas, and NumPy. The second Python 3 Text Processing with NLTK 3 Cookbook module teaches you the essential techniques of text and language processing with simple, straightforward examples. This includes organizing text corpora, creating your own custom corpus, text classification with a focus on sentiment analysis, and distributed text processing methods. The third Mastering Natural Language Processing with Python module will help you become an expert and assist you in creating your own NLP projects using NLTK. You will be guided through model development with machine learning tools, shown how to create training data, and given insight into the best practices for designing and building NLP-based applications using Python. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package and is designed to help you quickly learn text processing with Python and NLTK. It includes content from the following Packt products: NTLK essentials by Nitin Hardeniya Python 3 Text Processing with NLTK 3 Cookbook by Jacob Perkins Mastering Natural Language Processing with Python by Deepti Chopra, Nisheeth Joshi, and Iti Mathur Style and approach This comprehensive course creates a smooth learning path that teaches you how to get started with Natural Language Processing using Python and NLTK. You’ll learn to create effective NLP and machine learning projects using Python and NLTK.
Five Little Pigs (Poirot)
Five Little Pigs (Poirot)
Agatha Christie
¥61.51
Agatha Christie’s ingenious murder mystery, reissued with a striking new cover designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers. Beautiful Caroline Crale was convicted of poisoning her husband, yet there were five other suspects: Philip Blake (the stockbroker) who went to market; Meredith Blake (the amateur herbalist) who stayed at home; Elsa Greer (the three-time divorcee) who had roast beef; Cecilia Williams (the devoted governess) who had none; and Angela Warren (the disfigured sister) who cried ‘wee wee wee’ all the way home. It is sixteen years later, but Hercule Poirot just can’t get that nursery rhyme out of his mind…
4.50 from Paddington (Miss Marple)
4.50 from Paddington (Miss Marple)
Agatha Christie
¥56.02
Agatha Christie’s audacious mystery thriller, reissued with a striking cover designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers.
Lord Edgware Dies (Poirot)
Lord Edgware Dies (Poirot)
Agatha Christie
¥61.51
Agatha Christie’s famous murder mystery, reissued with a striking new cover designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers. Poirot had been present when Jane bragged of her plan to ‘get rid of’ her estranged husband. Now the monstrous man was dead. And yet the great Belgian detective couldn’t help feeling that he was being taken for a ride. After all, how could Jane have stabbed Lord Edgware to death in his library at exactly the same time she was seen dining with friends? And what could be her motive now that the aristocrat had finally granted her a divorce?
Third Girl (Poirot)
Third Girl (Poirot)
Agatha Christie
¥61.51
A perplexed girl thinks she might have killed someone… Three single girls shared the same London flat. The first worked as a secretary; the second was an artist; the third who came to Poirot for help, disappeared convinced she was a murderer. Now there were rumours of revolvers, flick-knives and blood stains. But, without hard evidence, it would take all Poirot’s tenacity to establish whether the third girl was guilty innocent or insane…
Mary Poppins (Collins Modern Classics)
Mary Poppins (Collins Modern Classics)
P. L. Travers
¥51.50
The original best-loved classic about the world’s most famous nanny – Mary Poppins.
Belgarath the Sorcerer
Belgarath the Sorcerer
David Eddings
¥75.73
The life story of Belgararth the Sorcerer: his own account of the great struggle that went before the Belgariad and the Malloreon, when gods stills walked the land. Here is the full epic story of Belgarath, the great sorcerer learned in the Will and the Word on whom the fate of the world depends. Only Belgarath can tell of those near-forgotten times when Gods still walked the land: he is the Ancient One, the Old Wolf, his God Aldur's first and most-favoured disciple. Using powers learned over the centuries Belgarath himself records the story of conflict between two mortally opposed Destinies that split the world asunder. A hugely entertaining work of great daring, wit, grandeur and excitement that confirms the role of Belgarath the Sorcerer as one of the mightiest fantasy creations of the century.
Wolf Hall
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
¥73.58
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2009 'Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,' says Thomas More, 'and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.' England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages. From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.
The Return of the King: The Lord of the Rings, Part 3
The Return of the King: The Lord of the Rings, Part 3
J. R. R. Tolkien
¥53.76
Concluding the story begun in The Hobbit, this is the final part of Tolkien’s epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. Featuring a striking black cover based on Tolkien’s own design, the definitive text, and a detailed map of Middle-earth. The armies of the Dark Lord are massing as his evil shadow spreads ever wider. Men, Dwarves, Elves and Ents unite forces to do battle agains the Dark. Meanwhile, Frodo and Sam struggle further into Mordor in their heroic quest to destroy the One Ring. Impossible to describe in a few words, JRR Tolkien’s great work of imaginative fiction has been labelled both a heroic romance and a classic fantasy fiction. By turns comic and homely, epic and diabolic, the narrative moves through countless changes of scene and character in an imaginary world which is totally convincing in its detail. Tolkien created a vast new mythology in an invented world which has proved timeless in its appeal.
The White Raven (The Oathsworn Series, Book 3)
The White Raven (The Oathsworn Series, Book 3)
Robert Low
¥72.30
The epic and action packed sequel to The Wolf Sea, charting the adventures of Orm and his band of Viking brothers, The Oathsworn The Oathsworn have itchy feet. Battle-hungry and tired of keeping the homestead fires burning, they are restless for action. And, being the Oathsworn, action is what they get. When their homestead is attacked by Klerkon and his men, the Oathsworn promise bloody revenge. But they didn’t count on having to undertake the most dangeous journey of their lives in order to save two of their number. Packed with epic adventure and bloody action, The White Raven is Robert Low at his very best.