Kaladin, having traded his medical apprenticeship for a sword to protect his brother, finds himself in military servitude in the wars that plague the world of Roshar, but he struggles on as commander Brightlord Dalinar Kholin tries to decipher an ancient text called "The Way of Kings," and Shallan, a young woman, trains to pull off a daring theft.

Dalinar Kholin's Alethi armies won a fleeting victory at a terrible cost: The enemy Parshendi summoned the violent Everstorm, which now sweeps the world with destruction, and in its passing awakens the once peaceful and subservient parshmen to the horror of their millennia-long enslavement by humans. While on a desperate flight to warn his family of the threat, Kaladin Stormblessed must come to grips with the fact that the newly kindled anger of the...

"As the ironic title indicates, Parker's latest tells the story of an individual life that takes extraordinary turns. As the story begins, the nameless, dying narrator takes us back to his childhood home in a remote corner of the ubiquitous Empire. The second of three sons, he lives there with his mother in a state of unrelieved poverty. Life eventually becomes so dire that the mother -- who can only find work as a prostitute -- is forced to sell...

In The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick's alternate history classic, the United States has lost World War II and subsequently been divided between the Germans in the east and the Japanese in the west. In this world, we meet characters like Frank Frink, a dealer of counterfeit Americana who is himself hiding his Jewish ancestry; Nobusuke Tagomi, the Japanese trade minister in San Francisco, unsure of his standing within the beauracracy and of...