The Last Kingdom is set in the England of the ninth and tenth centuries.

These were the years when the Danish Vikings had invaded and occupied three of England's four kingdoms, and when King Alfred, his son and grandson fought back and won the freedom of the country again.

The story is seen through the eyes of Uhtred, a dispossessed English nobleman. Captured as a child and raised by the Danes, he now finds his allegiances divided. But the one thing he knows is that he wants to recover his father's land, the fort by the wild northern sea that we now know as Bamburgh.

Bernard Cornwell is a master of historical fiction and this new series looking with a fresh light at Alfred the Great, his kingdom and his legacy will be as outstanding and as popular as the Grail Quest and the Warlord Chronicles.

Normal in-store physical product price: $26.00

What If You Could . . .
get all your work done by 6:00 p.m.?
eat dinner with your family every night?
form deep, satisfying relationships?
naturally blend the world of church with your everyday life?
spend hours a week on your hobbies?

You can! Making Room for Life reveals how to make all of these things a reality. Not by working faster or having more gadgets, but by simply choosing a lifestyle of conversation, and community over accumulation.

Randy Frazee’s practical, motivating insights call you back to the kind of relationships and life rhythms you were created to enjoy. In Making Room for Life, Frazee shows you how—and why it’s so important—to balance work and play, establish healthy boundaries, deal with children’s activities and homework, bring Jesus to your neighbors, and build authentic bonds with a circle of close friends. Share these insights with those around you and help usher in an amazing transformation: your life and the lives of others blooming, in the midst of the chaos and fragmentation of today’s culture, into communities of purpose and peace.

Normal in-store physical product price: $29.99

Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare's great series of four tragedies, the others being Othello (1603), King Lear (1605) and Macbeth (1606). In writing this extraordinary play Shakespeare effectively re-invented tragedy after an interval of roughly two thousand years - we have to go back to the Greek dramatists of 5th century Athens to find anything of comparable depth and maturity.

Certainly Shakespeare had already dealt with tragic themes and situations in plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Richard II and Julius Caesar, but in Hamlet he found himself able to fuse with complete artistic success the conflicting concerns of the private individual and the public state of which he is a member, or for which he may indeed be responsible - Hamlet is, after all. Prince of Denmark. This is a quin-tessentially Renaissance theme: it is no longer enough to appeal to an accepted moral or religious system, but instead each man must find out for himself a moral path through the 'unweeded garden' of life.

The first known version of the Hamlet story is found in the twelfth century Historia Danica by Saxo Grammaticus. Most of the main ingredients of the story are already present, albeit in primitive form, and some of the names, too -'Amlethus' for Hamlet. In 1576 Francois de Belleforest retold the story in his Histoires Tragiques, translated into English in 1608 and hence too late for Shakespeare to have read - but someone, perhaps Thomas Kyd, came across the story in the 1580's and turned it into a play which must have been Shakespeare's immediate source, however radically different Shakespeare's version turned out to be. We know, incidentally, that the idea of a ghost seeking revenge comes from this lost play: Thomas Lodge in 1596 writes of the 'ghost which cried so miserably at The Theater, like an oyster wife, "Hamlet, revenge. '"

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I am Princess Meredith, heir to a throne of fairie. My day job, once upon a time, was as a private detective in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, princess has now become a full-time occupation. My aunt, Queen Andais, will have it no other way. And so I am virtually a prisoner in fairie - trapped here with some of the realm’s most beautiful men to serve as my bodyguards…and my lovers. For I am compelled to conceive a child: an heir to succeed me on the throne.

Yet after months of amazing sex with my consorts, there is still no baby. And no baby means no throne. The only certainty is death at the hands of my cousin Cel, or his followers, if I fail to conceive. Now Mistral, Queen Andais’s new captain of the guard, has come to my bed - defying her and risking her terrible wrath in doing so. But even she will hesitate to punish him in jealous rage, because our joining has reawakened old magic, mystical power so ancient that no one stands against it and survives. Not even my strongest and most favored: my Darkness and my Killing Frost. Not even Mistral himself, my Storm Lord. But because Mistral has helped to bring this magic forth, he may live another day. If I can reclaim control of the fey power that once was, there may be hope for me and my reign in fairie. I might yet quell the dark schemes and subterfuges surrounding me. Though shadows of obsession and conspiracy gather, I may survive.

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