The
Fictionwise coupon code for the weekend,
062212, gives you 50% off for most books (no Samhain) and all magazines (of which there are several new issues this week). You you can add an extra 15% for the newly released titles (which change on Tuesday), although that is now limited to multi-format titles (which do work on Kindle), as no new eReader formatted titles have been released since April.
Today's Kindle Deal of the Day is
In the Courts of the Sun (
$2.99), by Brian D'Amato. The sequel,
The Sacrifice Game, is now available to pre-order, and will be an equally weighty tome in paper: 656 pages vs 700. Be warned, though: the synopsis for it contains spoilers for the earlier title, so I suggest not looking until you've finished it.
Book Description
The year is 2012. Math prodigy Jed DeLanda is enlisted to decipher an ancient Mayan codex containing the secrets of the Sacrifice Game. It foretells the end of civilization, and only Jed can prevent the coming apocalypse. He must play the Game himself-in a mind-bending journey that stretches from thousands of years in the past to the very brink of the end of time...
Little Girl Lost (
$1.56 / £0.99 UK), by Brian McGilloway, is the Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK (no US edition).
Book Description
During a winter blizzard a small girl is found wandering half-naked at the edge of an ancient woodland. Her hands are covered in blood, but it is not her own. Unwilling or unable to speak, the only person she seems to trust is the young officer who rescued her, Detective Sergeant Lucy Black. DS Black is baffled to find herself suddenly transferred from a high-profile case involving the kidnapping of a prominent businessman's teenage daughter, to the newly formed Public Protection Unit. Meanwhile, she has her own problems: caring for her Alzheimer's-stricken father; and avoiding conflict with her surly Assistant Chief Constable – who also happens to be her mother. As she struggles to identify the unclaimed child, Lucy begins to realise that this case and the kidnapping may be linked – by events that occurred during the blackest days of the country's recent history, events that also defined her own girlhood. Little Girl Lost is a devastating page-turner about corruption, greed and vengeance, and a father's love for his daughter.
Cleopatra and Antony: Power, Love, and Politics in the Ancient World ($9.49 Kindle,
$3.99 B&N), by Diana Preston, is the Nook Daily Find. I see signs that the Kindle edition is changing price to match (it's matching in one pricing server, but not the one that displays the product page), to if it hasn't when you read this, be sure to check back a little later today.
Book Description
On a stiflingly hot day in August, 30 B.C., the thirty-nine-year-old Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, took her own life, rather than be paraded in chains through Rome by her conqueror, Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. A few days earlier, her lover of eleven years, Mark Antony, had died in her arms following his own botched suicide attempt. Oceans of mythology have grown up around them, all of which Diana Preston puts to rest in her stirring history of the lives and times of a couple whose names-more than two millennia later-still invoke passion, curiosity, and intrigue.
This book sets the romance and tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra's personal lives within the context of their political times. There are many contemporary resonances: the relationship between East and West and the nature of empire, the concealment of personal ambition beneath the watchword of liberty, documents forged, edited or disposed of, special relationships established, constitutional forms and legal niceties invoked when it suited. Indeed their lives and deaths had deep political ramifications, and they offer a revealing perspective on a tipping point in Roman politics and on the consolidation of the Roman Empire. Three hundred years would pass before the east would, with the rise of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, once again take a share of political power in the Mediterranean. In an intriguing postscript, Preston speculates on what might have happened had Antony and Cleopatra defeated Octavian at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C.
Because of Winn-Dixie ($3.50 Kindle,
$2.99 B&N), by Kate DiCamillo, is the Nook Daily Find for Families. This one also shows signs of dropping in price, so may be there by afternoon.
Book Description
The summer Opal and her father, the preacher, move to Naomi, Florida, Opal goes into the Winn-Dixie supermarket and comes out with a dog. A big, ugly, suffering dog with a sterling sense of humor.A dog she dubs Winn-Dixie. Because of Winn-Dixie, the preacher tells Opal ten things about her absent mother, one for each year Opal has been alive.Winn-Dixie is better at making friends than anyone Opal has ever known, and together they meet the local librarian, Miss Franny Block, who once fought off a bear with a copy of WAR AND PEACE. They meet Gloria Dump, who is nearly blind but sees with her heart, and Otis, an ex-con who sets the animals in his pet shop loose after hours, then lulls them with his guitar.
Opal spends all that sweet summer collecting stories about her new friends and thinking about her mother. But because of Winn-Dixie or perhaps because she has grown, Opal learns to let go, just a little, and that friendship and forgiveness can sneak up on you like a sudden summer storm.
Recalling the fiction of Harper Lee and Carson McCullers, here is a funny, poignant, and utterly genuine first novel from a major new talent.
Grade Level: 4 and up
Living Rich by Spending Smart: How to Get More of What You Really Want (Main/UK), by Gregory Karp, is a repeat freebie on Kindle and from Barnes & Noble, courtesy of publisher FT Press. Careful using search on Kindle - there are two editions and only one is free; oddly enough, this time around it's the older edition, rather than the newer one that was free last time around.
