"Biologist and former soldier Lena is shocked when her missing husband comes home near death from a top-secret mission into The Shimmer, a mysterious quarantine zone from which no one has ever returned. Now, Lena and her elite team must enter a beautiful, deadly world of mutated landscapes and creatures, to discover how to stop the growing phenomenon that threatens all life on Earth." --

In search of a new adventure, Hippolyte Webb, quixotic spirit, modern-day explorer, and natural historian, sets his sights on the Auroras, a group of tiny islands in the middle of the South Atlantic. His destination wouldn't be so unusual, except that these islands were last spotted almost two hundred years ago. Equipped with a centuries-old map, an inadequate sailboat, and an advance payment for a book about his quest, Hippolyte embarks on an unforgettable...

"In the second volume of the Southern Reach Trilogy, questions are answered, stakes are raised, and mysteries are deepened. In Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer introduced Area X--a remote and lush terrain mysteriously sequestered from civilization. This was the first volume of a projected trilogy; well in advance of publication, translation rights had already sold around the world and a major movie deal had been struck. Just months later, Authority,...

On John Franklin's 1820 expedition to find the Northwest Passage, Michel Teroahaute cannibalized two team members and was preparing a third when he was caught and killed. When Rene La Salle set off for the Mississippi Delta in 1684, he missed the target by five hundred miles, but on landing, immediately built a prison for those who fell asleep on watch. Consummate storyteller Fergus Fleming brings together these and forty-three other gripping stories...

"A lively, colorful account of the adventures of Spanish, Portuguese, and English explorers emphasizes their diverse and seemingly contradictory motives." -- In the late fifteenth century Europe was astir with dreams of discovery that would shortly transform the world. It was an age of intense intellectual curiosity, of questioning, testing, and the balancing of conflicting motivations. The author, a distinguished Renaissance historian, has sorted...

Travel writer and Oxford geography don Nick Middleton takes us on a magical tour of countries that, lacking diplomatic recognition or UN membership, inhabit a world of shifting borders, visionary leaders and forgotten peoples.Beautifully illustrated by fifty regional maps, each shadowy country is literally cut out of the page of this book.

"Imagine an Age of Exploration full of alchemy, human dissection, sea monsters, betrayal, torture, religious controversy, and magic. In Europe, the magic is thin, but at the edge of the world, where the stars reach down close to the Earth, wonders abound. This drives the bravest explorers to the alluring Western Ocean. Christopher Sinclair is an alchemist who cares only about one thing: quintessence, a substance he believes will grant magical powers...