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"You did not tell the Abbess a single lie," Diamond said, "but you didn't tell her the truth."As a good Sombrist, Hunter Sessaire is aware that not only lying, but curiosity, is very much frowned upon by his community. As an apprentice archivist, he cannot resist the temptation to puzzle out how a manuscript could have been stolen from the room within the Sombrists' Labyrinth. A room that opens only during a planetary alignment. An alignment that has not yet taken place.But this is not the only enigma abroad in Muinbeo. Seemingly disparate occurrences remain opaque even to those normally in the know. Detective Chief Inspector Hal McCabe is scratching his head over the inexplicable vanishing of his apprentice, Salmon Farsade, and the dramatic and destructive theft of an ancient silver hand from the local school museum. The boundaries of Muinbeo, carefully managed to keep the Outland and its machinations outside, where they belong, have become a bit more porous than McCabe would like. Not least when he begins to suspect that some of the uncanny events may have their roots in a controversial Outland archaeological dig in Aegypt... Once again we are led into a maze of mystery by those not entirely reliable narrators, the Storytellers, in this enthralling sequel to Good Red Herring.For readers of all ages.

"It seems to me-and I no longer claim objective recall-that the morning on which I first arrived in Quettopolis looked much like this morning just breaking. One year ago. I was right at least that it was my last job."The Moufet Institute's mission is to protect endangered lepidoptera, but its experts are becoming bystanders, sidelined by the 'Players' and their pursuit of corporate self-perpetuation. Cuffe, recruited to create the rhetoric to underpin the new corporate vision, finds her inital confidence eroded by the peculiarities of the Institute and its environment-the punitive process with its absent defendant, the disregarded but omnipotent Registry, the quarterly Hunt, the Forest as it re-asserts itself.Then the Institute is galvanised by the discovery of a breeding pair of a rare moth species in a country in the throes of a military coup. The Institute in turn is riven by competing ambitions-the scientific specialists trying to save the moths, the Players trying to save the goose that lays the golden eggs. Meanwhile, no-one has been paying enough attention to what is happening in the basement...Hollowmen is an intricate and unsettling work, its shifting, interleaved narratives by turns ironic, lyrical, witty, and savage.

An encounter with an alien enemy. A strange epiphany in a fog-bound park. A collector of the names of the dead faces their own death. Rebel divinities respond to the prayers of des-pairing creation for deliverance. Bureaucrats find their grip on reality dissolving in odd ways. In these ten finely crafted and unsettling stories, Maxwell's slipstream style interweaves strands of naturalism, science fantasy, and the experimental irreal, illuminated by sharp flashes of wit and language of lyrical precision. Many of the characters exist in a state of slippage, alienated from a world they thought they knew by an encounter with something that is indifferent to them, but to which they cannot remain indifferent.More than twenty years separate the earliest and the most recent of the stories in this collection, but certain persistent preoccupations provide loose thematic links-environmental crime and retribution; the ways, both overt and insidious, in which institutions can corrupt or sacrifice those within them; the interpretations and recording of past events by unreliable narrators; and the pervasive, irreducible weirdness of existence.

"So the actual reason I was calling you is because-get this-I am not going to Prague this summer at all. Surprise! Thanks, Villa. Just ruin my life for me."Villa Grace is in disgrace. Her expulsion from school has ruined the prospect of a family holiday in imperial Prague, where her mother is organising a conference. Two of her three siblings are barely speaking to her, as all four face into a 'holiday' sweltering on Cobwell Farm in the back of beyond of drought-stricken Hibernia.But the power-hungry St. Maur Ker family has breached the border between mortal and sídhe for their own gain. Cobwell, on the threshold of myth, is about to become the centre of a battle between older, wilder forces and the technomantic ambitions of one of the empire's great aristo-corporate clans.Caught up in this conflict, the children are forced to face up to the dark underbelly of their parents' corporate environ-ment, and to confront their own conflicting ambitions and loyalties.This books is set in the same 'Hibernia Altera' universe as Maxwell's Good Red Herring, included in the Irish Times Best Books of 2014 for Children and Young Adults.For readers of all ages."Gorgeous and hilarious and profound." Siobhán Parkinson