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A story about a little person in a very big world. Magnus Mandalora never thought he would leave the safe confines of the small homely village of Lower Kertoob. He certainly never expected to end up in the middle of a long-running war between the saintly Cherines and the beastly Glurgs. But when circumstance places him in such a dubious position, he finds himself on a rollicking adventure where nothing is quite as it seems. Magnus Opum is an epic fantasy that's slightly skewed - Tolkien with a twist.

So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away is hugely underrated in the Brautigan canon. The narrative is laced with a sense of sadness for a lost way of life, the loss of childhood and the death of the American gothic, something Brautigan blames on television for the way it "crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their fantasies with dignity". Whereas in earlier works, Brautigan's characters viewed the world with child-like fascination, in this last book he reverses the process by examining a child's world through an adult's sad and diminishing gaze. It's a summation of all that Brautigan had previously achieved but in the harsher, colder climate of the late 20th century.

Time isn't what it used to be  TIME is not what it used to be. Once a flowing river whose current we passively monitored, time is now more properly understood as something constructed by the brain and personalised by culture. We have relationships with time; we fight it and manipulate it. Into this arena steps Eva Hoffman with her poetically scientific and austerely titled Time. Hoffman is on an exploration to become intimate with time, motivated by her sense that our interaction with time has changed. Our societies have become obsessed with time and timekeeping, both in the workplace and at home. Jet travel manipulates our experience of day-night cycles and seasons, while biomedical science races to increase our lifespan yet further. At the other end of the spectrum, new technologies adapt our minds to the ever-briefer scales of micro and nano. Hoffman covers a lot of ground, from physics (why time flows in only one direction) to biology (the circadian rhythm and sleep) to neuroscience (how temporality is constructed by the brain). She addresses questions of time and consciousness, including the uniquely human ability to envision large vistas of past or future. Perceived time is illuminated by disease states such as Alzheimer's disease or Korsakoff's syndrome, in which one's time narrative becomes disorganised, and by fantasies and dreams, in which the unconscious brain does not necessarily commit to a temporal narrative at all. Hoffman also investigates individual differences in how people treat time (those who leave parties early versus those who have to be shooed out at the end) as well as cultural differences (communities in which haste amounts to a breach of ethics, for instance). A recurring theme is that the human capacity to manipulate our environment ushers in new complexities to the basic biology of time. For example, while other animals age and die on a strict schedule, humans do everything in their power to control that timing. And the book is full of

Tamarisk Row is the story of a young boy growing up in Australia. He is a solitary-type and prefers to immerse himself in an imaginary world rather than mingle with kids his own age. His father is a compulsive gambler and because of this the world of horse racing becomes central to the boy's fantasies which feature a complex web of images involving calendars, colours, grasslands, creeks and rivers, Catholic rituals, priests' houses, horse races and racking skills, marbles, stones, freckles, books and libraries, and tunnels and secret places, that have all been used repeatedly and with remarkable consistency by Murnane in his subsequent fiction. It has been called "one of the very best books about childhood and the world as the child finds it."

"The following infographic suggests the best Christmas reads chosen by the writers of our essay writing service. There is a great choice of books classified in five categories: Children, Fantasy, Romance, Classics, and Mystery. Prepare your shopping list and hit the nearest bookstore today!"

A great pagan resource with many art galleries, as well as a useful website design tutorial.

Okay, we're not fans of the Harry Potter books here at Easy Witchcraft. Never mind that the series, which has enjoyed unprecedented marketing and therefore sales, is little more than rehashed old fantasy standbys peppered with embarrassingly awkward proper nouns. We'll also set aside the disturbingly elitist premise of inherited "magical-ness.' At Easy Witchcraft, we firmly believe everyone is born with the capacity for magic.

Tonya Cannariato is the first to review Jim Murdoch's ebook 'The Whole Truth' which at one point she compares to Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot'. It's a book containing two novels (which originally appeared separately as paperbacks) in which an old man ends up spending three days with the personification of truth for company. Philosophical, metaphysical, surreal and darkly comic by turns.

A story of a powerful and beautiful mage who is torn between the good and evil within herself.

A story of a powerful and beautiful mage who is torn between the good and evil within herself.

A story about a girl lost in an alternate world or is she in her dream?

A story about a girl lost in an alternate world or is she in her dream?