The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction --- but assassins are getting closer to her door. Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic. Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel. Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.

In a little village nestled in the Balou mountains, 14-year-old Li Niannian and his parents run a funeral parlor. One evening, he notices a strange occurrence. Instead of preparing for bed, more and more neighbors appear in the streets and fields, carrying on with their daily business as if the sun hadn’t already set. Li Niannian watches, mystified. As hundreds of residents are found dreamwalking, they act out the desires they’ve suppressed during waking hours. Before long, the community devolves into chaos, and it’s up to Li Niannian and his parents to save the town before sunrise.

England, 1324: a land rife with superstition and gripped by fear of the Church’s holy wrath. When a beggar is murdered in the quiet village of Bottesford, his body draped across the altar of St. Mary’s church in a perverse pose of pagan sacrifice, the Pope’s Inquisitor General places the small hamlet in his sights. Anxious to stave off the Inquisition, the Bishop of Lincoln dispatches Thomas Lester, son of a disgraced Templar Knight, to investigate --- but the Archbishop’s fanatical emissary has already arrived to conduct his own inquiry. Thomas’ investigation uncovers a viper’s nest of perfidious players. As this sordid drama unfolds, Thomas finds himself falling in love with a woman whose beauty is matched only by her defiance of the Church’s fearsome power.

Nero Augustus commands the Roman empire, ushering in an unprecedented era of artistic and cultural splendor. But in the 10th year of his reign, a terrifying prophecy comes to pass and a fire engulfs Rome, reducing entire swaths of the city to rubble. Rumors of Nero's complicity in the blaze start to sow unrest among the populace --- and the politicians. For better or worse, Nero knows that his fate is now tied to Rome's --- and he vows to rebuild it as a city that will stun the world. But there are those who find his rampant quest for glory dangerous. Throughout the empire, false friends and spies conspire against him, not understanding what drives him to undertake the impossible.

Alva Smith, her southern family destitute after the Civil War, married into one of America’s great Gilded Age dynasties: the newly wealthy but socially shunned Vanderbilts. Ignored by New York’s old-money circles and determined to win respect, she designed and built nine mansions, hosted grand balls and arranged for her daughter to marry a duke. But Alva also defied convention for women of her time, asserting power within her marriage and becoming a leader in the women's suffrage movement.

Six years after THE HALF-DROWNED KING, Ragnvald Eysteinsson is now king of Sogn, but fighting battles for King Harald keeps him away from home. Ragnvald’s sister, Svanhild, has found the freedom and adventure she craves at the side of the rebel explorer Solvi Hunthiofsson, though not without a cost. As a growing rebellion unites King Harald’s enemies, Ragnvald suspects that some Norse nobles are not loyal to Harald’s dream of a unified Norway. He sets a plan in motion to defeat all of his enemies and bring his sister back to his side. Svanhild finds herself with no easy decisions, and no choices that will leave her truly free. Their actions will hold irrevocable repercussions for the fates of those they love and for Norway itself.

With their magic diminishing, warring factions of New Orleans witches desperately search for the Book of the Unwinding --- a legendary grimoire, hidden by spells, that holds the key to unimaginable powers. As a ruthless struggle erupts in a maelstrom of malevolent magic, psychic Nathalie Boudreau finds her destiny intertwined with that of an exiled witch. Her name is Alice Marin, a vulnerable young woman trapped in a realm of illusion. Only Nathalie can free her, but first she must come to understand and master her own extraordinary abilities. Now, in a world where betrayals have become the order of the day, it will fall to two women to restore rightful balance amid terrifying chaos.

In the years preceding World War I, two young women meet in a provincial town in France. Suzanne Malherbe, a shy 17-year-old with a talent for drawing, is completely entranced by the brilliant but troubled Lucie Schwob, who comes from a family of wealthy Jewish intellectuals. They embark on a clandestine love affair, but then, in an astonishing twist of fate, the mother of one marries the father of the other. As “sisters” they are finally free of suspicion and move to Paris at a moment when art, literature and politics blend in an explosive cocktail. In the 1930s, with the rise of anti-Semitism and threat of fascism, they leave Paris for Jersey, creating a campaign of propaganda against Hitler’s occupying forces that will put their lives in jeopardy.

Robert Weekes is a practitioner of empirical philosophy --- an arcane, female-dominated branch of science used to summon the wind, shape clouds of smoke, heal the injured, and even fly. When a deadly accident puts his philosophical abilities to the test, Robert wins a scholarship to study at Radcliffe College, an all-women’s school. He falls hard for Danielle Hardin, a disillusioned young war hero turned political radical. However, Danielle’s activism and Robert’s recklessness attract the attention of the same fanatical anti-philosophical group that Robert’s mother fought years before. Robert and Danielle band together to fight for Robert’s place among the next generation of empirical philosophers --- and for philosophy’s very survival against the men who would destroy it.

Magic is seeping out of the world, leaving the witches who have relied on it for countless centuries increasingly hopeless. Young Alice Marin is using magic’s waning days to delve into the mystery of numerous disappearances in the occult circles of New Orleans. Alice disappeared once, too --- caged in an asylum by blood relatives. Recently freed, she fears her family may be more involved with the growing crisis than she ever dared imagine. Yet the more she seeks the truth about her family’s troubled history, the more she realizes her already-fragile psyche may be at risk.