Mistborn Trilogy: The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, The Hero of Ages

Librarian note: alternate-cover editions can be found here - 26 May 2009.Lissa Dragomir is a mortal vampire.She must be protected at all times from the fiercest and most dangerous vampires of all - the ones who will never die.Rose Hathaway is Lissa's best friend - and her bodyguard.Now after two years of illicit freedom, they've been dragged back inside the iron gates of St. Vladimir's Academy. The girls must survive in a world of forbidden romances, a ruthless social scene and terrifying night-time rituals.But above all, they must never let their guard down, lest the immortal vampires take Lissa - forever...

As Michio Kaku reveals, what for 250 years was science-fiction fantasy is now the likeliest picture of reality... the journey he takes the reader on is so pituresque and the conclusions so startling that you are gripped - Sunday TimesThe world is coming to an end. But humankind's story is only just beginning...Imagine a future where we are not alone. Where our universe is just one of countless parallel worlds - some strangely familiar, some almost unimaginable. And that, when planet earth finally runs down to a cold, dark wasteland, we will be able to escape into these new worlds and start again. Kaku's thrilling guide to the galaxy shows us how it could happen sooner than we think - and the future for intelligent life is one of endless possibilities.Kaku brings his formidable explanatory talents to bear on one of the strangest and most exciting possibilities to have emerged from modern physics... wonderful - Brian GreeneOne of the gurus of modern physics - Financial TimesNobody who reads this book cane be anything less than amazed - Scotland on SundayAn exhilarating romp through the frontiers of cosmology - Martin ReesCover image: Joe Tucciarone / Science Photo Library

Berwick and Chomsky draw on recent developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary account of language and humans' remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire it.“A loosely connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary phenomenon of language.”—New York Review of BooksWe are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language: a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—“the language faculty”—raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language.Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define “language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals.Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world: the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding: the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language: and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.

It begins with absence and desire. It begins with blood and fear. It begins with a discovery of witches. When historian Diana Bishop opens an alchemical manuscript in the Bodleian Library, it's an unwelcome intrusion of magic into her carefully ordered life. Though Diana is a witch of impeccable lineage, the violent death of her parents while she was still a child convinced her that human fear is more potent than any witchcraft. Now Diana has unwittingly exposed herself to a world she's kept at bay for years: one of powerful witches, creative, destructive daemons and long-lived vampires. Sensing the significance of Diana's discovery, the creatures gather in Oxford, among them the enigmatic Matthew Clairmont, a vampire genticist. Diana is inexplicably drawn to Matthew and, in a shadowy world of half-truths and old enmities, ties herself to him without fully understanding the ancient line they are crossing. As they begin to unlock the secrets of the manuscript and their feelings for each