Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a very English story. A story of woods and clearings, a story of folk tales and family histories. It is as if Neil Gaiman and Joanne Harris had written a Fairy Tale together. It is Christmas afternoon and Peter Martin gets an unexpected phonecall from his parents, asking him to come round. It pulls him away from his wife and children and into a bewildering mystery. He arrives at his parents house and discovers that they have a visitor. His sister Tara. Not so unusual you might think, this is Christmas after all, a time when families get together. But twenty years ago Tara took a walk into the woods and never came back and as the years have gone by with no word from her the family have, unspoken, assumed that she was dead. Now she's back, tired, dirty, dishevelled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent travelling the world, an epic odyssey taken on a whim. But her stories don't quite hang together and once she has cleaned herself up and got some sleep it becomes apparent that the intervening years have been very kind to Tara. She really does look no different from the yound women who walked out the door twenty years ago. Peter's parents are just delighted to have their little girl back, but Peter and his best friend Richie, Tara's one time boyfriend, are not so sure. Tara seems happy enough but there is something about her. A haunted, otherworldly quality. Some would say it's as if she's off with the fairies. And as the months go by Peter begins to suspect that the woods around their homes are not finished with Tara and his family...

"Whether it is described as recovering treasures of gold, removing the clouds to reveal the clearest and bluest of skies, replacing fast food with delectable and healthy cuisine, or coming out of the valley to behold the most amazing Alpine splendor, rediscovering the glorious biblical truths which were recovered during the Reformation is extraordinarily liberating and invigorating." The biblical teachings of the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago freed Christians from many of the same forms of bondage that, ironically, have now reappeared in much of contemporary evangelical Christianity. Many evangelicals now find themselves trapped on performance-based treadmills, enslaved by neurotic introspection, and often just burning out and walking away from the church. Whether it's being fixated on "my performance" (legalism) or "my inner experience" (mysticism) or some other exhausting entanglement, there is, thankfully, a way out. Protestant evangelical churches need to rediscover the liberating treasures of biblical Christianity that were recovered in the Protestant Reformation. This book encourages burned-out evangelicals to take another look--from a Reformation perspective--and begin basking in the good news and all of its vast riches. Through a series of thought-provoking essays, this book also introduces other skeptics to an undiluted and robust Christianity.

This comprehensive collection of folk hero tales builds on the success of the first edition by providing readers with expanded contextual information on story characters from the Americas to Zanzibar. Despite the tremendous differences between cultures and ethnicities across the world, all of them have folk heroes and heroines—real and imagined—that have been represented in tales, legends, songs, and verse. These stories persist through time and space, over generations, even through migrations to new countries and languages. This encyclopedia is a one-stop source for broad coverage of the world's folk hero tales. Geared toward high school and early college readers, the book opens with an overview of folk heroes and heroines that provides invaluable context and then presents a chronology. The book is divided into two main sections: the first provides entries on the major types and themes; the second addresses specific folk tale characters organized by continent with folk hero entries organized alphabetically. Each entry provides cross references as well as a list of further readings. Continent sections include a bibliography for additional research. The book concludes with an alphabetical list of heroes and an index of hero types.

Legendary nationally bestselling Western authors return with a brand-new West Texas–set series for their legions of loyal fans. WILL THIS BE . . . THE LAST WAGON TRAIN? A new railroad line is coming to Hansen’s Bend—and the Old West will never be the same. Especially for the Callahans. They’ve been running the local wagon train outfit for years. But now a pompous rail boss named Arbuckle wants to put them out of business. This big-city weasel mocks the Callahans’ “slow-poke” wagons—and bets he can finish laying track all the way to the end of the line before Callahan’s wagon train even makes it over the mountains. Callahan accepts the challenge—and gets gunned down before it even starts . . . But the contest isn’t over. The wagoner’s son, Luke “Tomahawk” Callahan, has returned to Hansen’s Bend after five years as an army scout. He knows nothing about the rail boss’s challenge or his father’s murder—until he sees the newspaper headline: “The Last Wagon Train?” The pretty lady journalist who wrote it wants to ride along and follow this story to the end. And of course, Tomahawk wants to defend his father’s honor and avenge his death. But Arbuckle has sent his henchmen to sabotage the wagon train to make sure Tomahawk and his wagons are dead on arrival . . .

A finalist for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction A finalist for the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel Introducing an extraordinary and original writer whose first novel explores the intersections of grief and rage, personal strength and healing--and what we owe one another. Fern seeks refuge from her mother’s pill-popping and boyfriends via Soul Train; Gwin finds salvation in the music of Prince much to her congregation’s dismay and Jesenia, miles ahead of her classmates at her gifted and talented high school, is a brainy and precocious enigma. None of this matters to Boss Man, the monster who abducts them and holds them captive in a dilapidated house in Queens. On the night they are finally rescued, throngs line the block gawking and claiming ignorance. Among them is lifetime resident Miss Metropolitan, advice columnist for the local weekly, but how could anyone who fancies herself a “newspaperwoman” have missed a horror story unfolding right across the street? And why is it that only two of the three girls—now women—were found? The mystery haunts the two remaining “victim girls” who are subjected to the further trauma of becoming symbols as they continuously adapt to their present and their unrelenting past. Like Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan gives voice to characters surviving unimaginable tragedy. The story is inventively revealed before, during, and after the ordeal in this singular and urgent novel.