[WT Sharpe]

Wondering if a particular book is available in your country? The following spoiler contains a list of bookstores outside the United States you can search. If you don't see a bookstore on this list for your country, find one that is, send me the link via PM, and I'll add it to the list. Also, if you find one on the list that is no longer in operation, let me know and I'll remove it from the list.

Spoiler:

Australian
Angus Robertson
Booktopia
Borders
Dymocks
Fishpond
Google

Canada
Amazon. Make sure you are logged out. Then go to the Kindle Store. Search for a book. After the search results come up, in the upper right corner of the screen, change the country to Canada and search away.
Google
Sony eBookstore (Upper right corner switch to/from US/CA)

UK
BooksOnBoard (In the upper right corner is a way to switch to the UK store)
Amazon
Foyle's
Google
Penguin
Random House
Waterstones
WH Smith

** The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross [JSWolf, caleb72]
Goodreads | Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo UK / Kobo US / Overdrive
Print Length: 368 pages

Spoiler:

Bob Howard is a low-level techie working for The Laundry, a super-secret government agency. While his colleagues are out saving the world, Bob's under a desk restoring lost data. None of them receive any thanks for the jobs they do, but at least a techie doesn't risk getting shot or eaten in the line of duty. Bob's world is dull but safe, and that's the way it should have stayed; but then he went and got Noticed.

Now, Bob Howard is up to his neck in spycraft, alternative universes, dimension-hopping nazis, Middle Eastern terrorists, damsels in distress, ancient Lovecraftian horror and the end of the world.

Only one thing is certain: it will take more than control-alt-delete to sort this mess out...

* Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson [szarroug3]
Goodreads | Amazon US / Overdrive
Print Length: 676 pages

Spoiler:

In a world where ash falls from the sky, and mist dominates the night, an evil cloaks the land and stifles all life. The future of the empire rests on the shoulders of a troublemaker and his young apprentice. Together, can they fill the world with color once more?

*** The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov [WT Sharpe, Dazrin, issybird]
Goodreads | Amazon US / Kobo US
Print Length: 256 pages

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

One of Isaac Asimov's SF masterpieces, this stand-alone novel is a monument of the flowering of SF in the twentieth century. It is widely regarded as Asimov's single best SF novel.

Andrew Harlan is an Eternal, a member of the elite of the future. One of the few who live in Eternity, a location outside of place and time, Harlan's job is to create carefully controlled and enacted Reality Changes. These Changes are small, exactingly calculated shifts in the course of history, made for the benefit of humankind. Though each Change has been made for the greater good, there are also always costs.

During one of his assignments, Harlan meets and falls in love with Noÿs Lambent, a woman who lives in real time and space. Then Harlan learns that Noÿs will cease to exist after the next Change, and he risks everything to sneak her into Eternity.

Unfortunately, they are caught. Harlan's punishment? His next assignment: Kill the woman he loves before the paradox they have created results in the destruction of Eternity.

*** The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein [CRussel, treadlightly, Grey Ram]
Goodreads | Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo US
Print Length: 288 pages

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

Freedom of Information
If you ask, she must answer. A steerswoman's knowledge is shared with any who request it; no steerswoman may refuse a question, and no steerswoman may answer with anything but the truth.

And if she asks, you must answer. It is the other side of tradition's contract -- and if you refuse the question, or lie, no steerswoman will ever again answer even your most casual question.

And so, the steerswomen — always seeking, always investigating — have gathered more and more knowledge about the world they traveled, and they share that knowledge freely.

Until the day that the steerswoman Rowan begins asking innocent questions about one small, lovely, inexplicable object…

Her discoveries grow stranger and deeper, and more dangerous, until suddenly she finds she must flee or fight for her life. Or worse -- lie.

Because one kind of knowledge has always been denied the the steerswomen:
Magic.

Reviewers comments:

“If you haven’t read Kirstein’s Steerswoman books I envy you the chance to read them now for the first time.... I think they have a very good claim to be my favorite thing still being written. […] If you like science, and if you like watching someone work out mysteries, and if you like detailed weird alien worlds and human cultures, if really good prose appeals... you’re really in luck.” — Jo Walton, Hugo and Nebula Awards winner, author of Among Others and Farthing.

"[Kirstein] walks the tightrope between fantasy and science fiction with precision and grace... [her] compassion for even minor characters is evident on every page, and her prose is measured and alluring without being overworked." -- Damien Broderick & Paul Di Filippo, in Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

*** 1632 by Eric Flint [CRussel, WT Sharpe, issybird]
Goodreads | Amazon US / Audible / Baen
Print Length: 612 pages

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

The Ultimate Y2K Glitch....

1632 In the year 1632 in northern Germany a reasonable person might conclude that things couldn't get much worse. There was no food. Disease was rampant. For over a decade religious war had ravaged the land and the people. Catholic and Protestant armies marched and countermarched across the northern plains, laying waste the cities and slaughtering everywhere. In many rural areas population plummeted toward zero. Only the aristocrats remained relatively unscathed; for the peasants, death was a mercy.

2000 Things are going OK in Grantville, West Virginia. The mines are working, the buck are plentiful (it's deer season) and everybody attending the wedding of Mike Stearn's sister (including the entire membership of the local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, which Mike leads) is having a good time.

THEN, EVERYTHING CHANGED....

When the dust settles, Mike leads a small group of armed miners to find out what's going on. Out past the edge of town Grantville's asphalt road is cut, as with a sword. On the other side, a scene out of Hell; a man nailed to a farmhouse door, his wife and daughter Iying screaming in muck at the center of a ring of attentive men in steel vests. Faced with this, Mike and his friends don't have to ask who to shoot.

At that moment Freedom and Justice, American style, are introduced to the middle of The Thirty Years War.

At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

** Looking Through Lace by Ruth Nestvold [Dazrin, Grey Ram]
Goodreads | Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble
Print Length: 79 pages

Spoiler:

As the only woman on the first contact team, xenolinguist Toni Donato expected her assignment on Christmas would be to analyze the secret women's language -- but then the chief linguist begins to sabotage her work. What is behind it? Why do the men and women have separate languages in the first place? What Toni learns turns everything she thought they knew on its head.

Originally published in Asimov's in 2003, "Looking Through Lace" was a finalist for the Tiptree and Sturgeon awards. The Italian translation won the Premio Italia for best work of speculative fiction in translation in 2007.

** Heaven by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen [pdurrant, CRussel]
Goodreads | Amazon US / Kobo US
Print Length: 364 pages

Spoiler:

All Second-Best Sailor wants is to sail his boat and trade with the wandering Neanderthals. But when the reefwives discover that a Cosmic Unity mission fleet is heading for his homeworld, his comfortable lifestyle vanishes in an instant. All Servant-of-Unity XIV Samuel wants is to help spread Cosmic Unity's message of harmony to a grateful galaxy. But the ecclesiarchs decide that Samuel is destined for greater things. Flung together by fate, the two men find themselves on opposite sides of a battle for the hearts and minds of every sentient creature in the galaxy. Together, they uncover Cosmic Unity's deepest secret, and come up with a kamikaze plan to fight off the invaders. But along the way, they will need help from the unlikeliest of allies.

*** The Giver by Lois Lowry [Grey Ram, treadlightly, JSWolf]
Goodreads | Amazon US / Google Play / Kobo
Print Length: 204 pages

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

In the "ideal" world into which Jonas was born, everybody has sensibly agreed that well-matched married couples will raise exactly two offspring, one boy and one girl. These children's adolescent sexual impulses will be stifled with specially prescribed drugs; at age 12 they will receive an appropriate career assignment, sensibly chosen by the community's Elders. This is a world in which the old live in group homes and are "released"--to great celebration--at the proper time; the few infants who do not develop according to schedule are also "released," but with no fanfare. Lowry's development of this civilization is so deft that her readers, like the community's citizens, will be easily seduced by the chimera of this ordered, pain-free society. Until the time that Jonah begins training for his job assignment--the rigorous and prestigious position of Receiver of Memory--he, too, is a complacent model citizen. But as his near-mystical training progresses, and he is weighed down and enriched with society's collective memories of a world as stimulating as it was flawed, Jonas grows increasingly aware of the hypocrisy that rules his world. With a storyline that hints at Christian allegory and an eerie futuristic setting, this intriguing novel calls to mind John Christopher's Tripods trilogy and Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl. Lowry is once again in top form--raising many questions while answering few, and unwinding a tale fit for the most adventurous readers. Ages 12-14.

*** Brave New World by Aldous Huxley [drofgnal, issybird, GA Russell]
Goodreads | Amazon US
Print Length: 158 pages

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

Aldous Huxley's tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future—where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order. A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, it remains remarkably relevant to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying entertainment.

*** A Door Into Summer by Robert A Heinlein [fantasyfan, drofgnal, pdurrant]
Goodreads | Amazon US
Print Length: 304 pages

Spoiler:

When Dan Davis is crossed in love and stabbed in the back by his business associates, the immediate future doesn't look too bright for him and Pete, his independent-minded tomcat. Suddenly, the lure of suspended animation, the Long Sleep, becomes irresistible and Dan wakes up 30 years later in the 21st century, a time very much to his liking.
The discovery that the robot household appliances he invented have been mass produced is no surprise, but the realization that, far from having been stolen from him, they have, mysteriously, been patented in his name is. There's only one thing for it. Dan somehow has to travel back in time to investigate.
He may even find Pete ...

** The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells [GA Russell, caleb72]
Goodreads | Amazon US / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo US
Print Length: 130 pages

Spoiler:

From Wikipedia:

The Invisible Man is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells. Originally serialized in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light and thus becomes invisible. He successfully carries out this procedure on himself, but fails in his attempt to reverse it.

*** The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. [WT Sharpe, din155, Dazrin]
Goodreads | Amazon US
Print Length: 338 pages pages

Spoiler:

The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there’s a catch to the invitation–and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell.

** Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein [caleb72, GA Russell]
Goodreads | Amazon US
Print Length: 452 pages

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

Here at last is the complete, uncut version of Heinlein's all-time masterpiece, the brilliant novel that grew from a cult favorite to a bestseller to a classic in a few short years. It is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, the man from Mars who taught humankind grokking and water-sharing. And love.

The nominations are now closed.