Artist and author Dennis Cooper re-launched his popular blog on Monday after months of legal disputes with Google, who many accused of censorship.

The artist posted a message on the blog’s Facebook account on Friday to explain Google’s reasoning for erasing his 14-year-old blog, which housed a gif novel he was working on.

According to Cooper, someone had reported a post on DC’s Blog, which was hosted on the Google-owned Blogspot, from 10 years ago as they felt it constituted child abuse images, and Google immediately deactivated his account.

The post was part of a “Self-Portrait Day” series in which Cooper asked users to send him things related to a topic he selected.

“In 2006, I did one of those posts where I asked people to send me things they thought were sexy,” he wrote on Facebook. Cooper said he placed the post behind an adult content warning after seeing some of the responses.

Cooper’s DC’s Blog had been a prime destination for fans of experimental literature and avant garde writing. It was updated six times a week, highlighting film, fiction and music he enjoyed. Cooper’s work often depicts sexuality and violence in graphic terms, and some of the writing and images dealt with similar themes.

When his blog was removed without warning, it raised first amendment concerns in the art community, and many were worried he may have suffered censorship at the hands of Google.

“It’s just yet another means by which certain members of the government or certain internet conglomerates have decided to make it impossible for culture to be produced,” Stuart Comer, a curator at MoMA and a longtime fan of Cooper’s work, told the Guardian when the site was first taken down.

Cooper’s troubles started two months ago when his Gmail was disabled without reason. He later attempted to log into his blog and received a notice saying it was suspended due to a violation of Google’s terms of service. Cooper lost 10 years’ worth of correspondence in his emails, all his blogposts, and a gif novel called Zac’s Freight Elevator, which was slated for release in the coming months.

Cooper told the Guardian that Google originally provided no explanation for taking down his site and didn’t respond to the lawyers he enlisted; even Google employees who were fans of his work were unable to uncover what happened.

Cooper received an outpouring of support from fans of his work which resulted in several articles on the issue from international media outlets, a statement of support from PEN America and a petition to recover the blog.

According to Cooper’s Facebook post, Google began negotiating with his lawyer on 15 July and eventually agreed to provide all the data from his disabled blog, the data from his 10 years of correspondence in his Gmail account and his novel. The data from his site will be put up on a new site, post-by-post on a new domain, starting on Monday.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies author Seth Grahame-Smith is being sued by his publisher for delivering a manuscript that Hachette claims is “an appropriation of a 120-year-old public-domain work”.

Grahame-Smith, who unleashed the zombie mashup on the world with the surprise 2009 hit Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and went on to write the bestseller Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, is being taken to court by Hachette for breach of contract. The complaint, which was posted online by Publishers Marketplace, says that the author and publisher made a $4m (£3m) deal in 2010 for Grahame-Smith to deliver two new works, with an initial instalment of $1m paid to the author.

Grahame-Smith delivered the first book, The Last American Vampire, a sequel to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter that was published in January 2015. But according to Hachette, the deadline for delivery of the second was extended from June 2013 to April 2016.

The complaint says the Grahame-Smith delivered the second manuscript in June 2016, but alleges that the work was “not original to Smith, but instead is in large part an appropriation of a 120-year-old public-domain work”, that it “materially varies from the 80,000-100,000 word limit” agreed on, and that it “is not comparable in style and quality to Smith’s wholly original bestseller Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”. That novel imagined the 16th US president as the nemesis of the forces of the undead during the civil war.

Hachette is suing Grahame-Smith and his company Baby Gorilla for at least $500,000 – half of the advance it paid him six years ago, plus interest – saying that “by delivering a manuscript that varied so materially and substantially from that described in the agreement”, he is in breach of contract.

JK Rowling has sung the praises of a recent study which found that reading the Harry Potter books lowers Americans’ opinions of Donald Trump.

The bestselling novelist has already made her feelings on Trump clear, writing in an open letter in June that the presidential candidate is “fascist in all but name”. “His stubby fingers are currently within horrifyingly close reach of [the US’s] nuclear codes. He achieved this pre-eminence by proposing crude, unworkable solutions to complex threats. Terrorism? ‘Ban all Muslims!’ Immigration? ‘Build a wall!’,” wrote Rowling. “He has the temperament of an unstable nightclub bouncer, jeers at violence when it breaks out at his rallies and wears his disdain for women and minorities with pride. God help America. God help us all.”

This weekend, Rowling pointed on Twitter to a study into whether reading the Harry Potter books influences Americans’ attitudes to Trump. Harry Potter and the Deathly Donald was recently published in PS: Political Science and Politics.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Professor Diana Mutz polled a nationally representative sample of 1,142 Americans for the study, in 2014, and again in 2016. She asked them about their Harry Potter consumption, and using a zero to 100 scale, about their attitudes on issues from the death penalty to the treatment of Muslims, and in 2016, their feelings about Donald Trump.

Democrats, Republicans and independents had all read the Harry Potter books in roughly equal numbers, found Mutz. She also discovered that each Potter book that her respondents had read lowered their feelings about Trump by two to three points on the 100-point scale.

“This may seem small,” she said. “But for someone who has read all seven books, the total impact could lower their estimation of Trump by 18 points out of 100.”

Mutz said that even when she controlled for issues including gender, education and age, all of which predict Americans’ attitudes to Trump, the “Harry Potter effect” remained.

Mutz writes in the study that similarities between Trump and Potter’s nemesis Voldemort “have not gone without notice during the 2016 campaign”, with the term Trumpdemort gaining traction, and “even Trump supporters … buying into the analogy, purchasing Trump posters featuring their candidate in front of an American flag as backdrop, with a quote from the Dark Lord himself: ‘There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.’”

She points out similarities between the fictional wizard and the Republican candidate for president, including how Voldemort “supports the eradication of mixed blood wizards”, and how “in comparison, Donald Trump has called for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration”.

“It may simply be too difficult for Harry Potter readers to ignore the similarities between Trump and the power-hungry Voldemort,” she writes in the study.

Mutz found that the Potter films, by contrast, did not lead to Trump opposition – possibly, she believes, because “reading inherently requires much higher levels of attention and allows for greater nuance in characters, many of whom are neither wholly good nor wholly bad”, and “due to length, movies must leave out material from the full books, and they are more likely to emphasise action over the characters’ internal dilemmas and introspection”.

Mutz ends her study by speculating that “these findings raise the hope that Harry Potter can stop the Deathly Donald and make America great again in the eyes of the world, just as Harry did by ridding the wizard world of Voldemort”.

“Throughout the series, love and kindness consistently triumph over aggression and prejudice,” she said. “It’s a powerful, positive theme, and thus not surprising that readers understand the underlying message of this storyline, and are moved by it. These pro-unity views come through loud and clear in the storyline and have also been publicly voiced by the author of the series, JK Rowling, who has … espoused anti-Brexit and anti-Trump political views. Harry Potter’s popularity worldwide stands to make a difference not just in the US election, but in elections across Europe that involve aggressive and domineering candidates worldwide.”

Spiegelman’s family story has been told before, as a footnote in her dad Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning graphic novel, Maus. But here, she dives into her matriarchal lineage through wine-soaked discussions with her mother, longtime New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly, and her French grandmother, Josée. Nadja finds herself looking through a fun-house mirror of her familial past and her own confusing adolescence, which was overshadowed by her successful parents and the trauma of 9/11. At times, it’s hard to empathize with her indulgent recounting of a privileged upbringing in New York, but she saves herself with prose that’s tender and delicate.

While writing Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency, James Andrew Miller conducted more than 500 interviews with CAA’s best-known agents and myriad actors and industry executives.

At 703 pages, Powerhouse is exhaustive and exhausting. But as was true of Miller’s earlier oral histories about ESPN and Saturday Night Live (both written with Tom Shales), Powerhouse often fails to resolve conflicting recollections, and too many anecdotes lack interest or importance.

The book is at its best chronicling the way CAA launched after its founders left the William Morris Agency in 1975 and built a juggernaut over the next two decades. The two most well-known founders, Michael Ovitz and Ron Meyer, speak with candor and emotion about showbiz, each other, and themselves. Meyer is uniformly loved and respected—by Sylvester Stallone, Donald Sutherland, Whoopi Goldberg, Cher—while Ovitz, the more driven and more important force in the firm’s success, gets contradictory reviews. David Letterman, Bill Murray, and Magic Johnson all speak of his genius and his effectiveness. Dustin Hoffman is more ambivalent, and studio executive Jeffrey Katzenberg is quoted, without elaboration, saying, “There is no question that Michael Ovitz is someone who consistently dealt in ways that were destructive, deceitful, and in bad faith.” (While I have known Ovitz and, for that matter, Katzenberg and many others quoted at length for decades, I have never witnessed Ovitz behaving the way Katzenberg says he did.)

When Ovitz and Meyer both leave CAA, after competing for the same job running a studio and fighting over a pricey Malibu property, a new generation of young agents is left to rebuild CAA. They do so successfully, even after selling control of it to TPG, a large private-equity firm. Miller dutifully chronicles that success, but absent an author’s voice and critical eye, Powerhouse limps to a desultory finish line. B-

The winners of the 2016 Hugo awards have been announced, with this year’s choices signalling a resounding defeat for the so-called “Puppies” campaigns to derail the venerable annual honouring of science fiction literature and drama.

The winners were announced on Saturday evening at MidAmeriCon II, the World Science Fiction Convention held this year in Kansas City.

As in previous years, there had been attempts by two separate groups, the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies, to “game” the awards in favour of their preferred slates of works. Both groups claimed that science fiction has become dominated by a liberal, left-wing bias.

The Hugos are voted on by those who purchase an attending or supporting membership to either the current or previous Worldcon events. Eligible voters can tick the “No Award” box if they don’t agree with any of the shortlisted works, a tool which has been used to block out Puppies recommendations previously. In 2015, five No Awards were given, including for the prestigious best novella and best short story categories; an unprecedented number, as No Award had only been presented as many times in the entire history of the prize, which began in 1953.

In contrast, this year there were only two No Awards, in the smaller best related work and best fan-cast categories.

Best novel went to NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, a richly-detailed story of a planet undergoing a periodic and catastrophic season of apocalyptic climate change. Jemisin has previously clashed with Rabid Puppies co-ordinator Theodore Beale, who was expelled from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America after he publicly called the black author an “educated but ignorant savage”.

The highly-acclaimed Binti by Nnedi Okorafor scooped best novella. The tale of a member of the first member of the Himba community on Earth to be accepted into a prestigious intergalactic university, Binti also won the Nebula award for the same category earlier this year.

And best novelette was given to Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfanq, a Chinese science fiction story which, translated by Ken Liu, appeared in Uncanny Magazine.

The best short story, best editor long form, best editor short form, and best professional artist awards all went to women nominees — respectively Naomi Kritzer for her piece Cat Pictures Please, Ellen Datlow, Sheila E Gilbert and Abigail Larson.

In other categories, Neil Gaiman’s return to the character that made his name earned him the best graphic story award, along with artist JH Williams III, for Sandman: Overture, while Oscar-nominated film The Martian and Marvel TV show Jessica Jones won for the best dramatic presentations.

While only two No Awards were given this year, the Hugo award organisers now face the decision of whether to change how the nomination system currently works. With people able to buy supporting memberships to Worldcons — even if they have no intention of attending — to ensure they have a say in what ultimately gets on the ballot, the Hugos remain democratic, if vulnerable to internet campaigns.

The 2016 Hugo award winners

Best novel: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

Best novella: Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com)

Best novelette: “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, translated Ken Liu (Uncanny Magazine, Jan-Feb 2015)

Best short story: “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld, January 2015)

Best related work: No Award

Best graphic story: The Sandman: Overture written by Neil Gaiman, art by J.H. Williams III (Vertigo)

Best dramatic presentation (long form): The Martian screenplay by Drew Goddard, directed by Ridley Scott (Scott Free Productions; Kinberg Genre; TSG Entertainment; 20th Century Fox)

Best dramatic presentation (short form): Jessica Jones: “AKA Smile” written by Scott Reynolds, Melissa Rosenberg, and Jamie King, directed by Michael Rymer (Marvel Television; ABC Studios; Tall Girls Productions; Netflix)

Best editor - short form: Ellen Datlow

Best editor - long form: Sheila E. Gilbert

Best professional artist: Abigail Larson

Best semiprozine: Uncanny Magazine edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, and Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky

Best fanzine: File 770 edited by Mike Glyer

Best fancast: No Award

Best fan writer: Mike Glyer

Best fan artist: Steve Stiles

The John W. Campbell Award for the best new professional science fiction or fantasy writer of 2014 or 2015, sponsored by Dell Magazines (not a Hugo Award): Andy Weir

It’s one of the world’s most mysterious books, a centuries-old manuscript written in an unknown or coded language that no one has cracked.

Scholars have spent their lives puzzling over the Voynich manuscript, whose intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women has some believing it holds magical powers.

The weathered book is locked away in a vault at Yale university’s Beinecke library, emerging only occasionally.

But after a 10-year appeal for access, Siloe, a small publishing house in northern Spain has secured the right to clone the document – to the delight of its director.

“Touching the Voynich is an experience,” says Juan Jose Garcia, sitting on the top floor of a book museum in the quaint centre of Burgos where Siloe’s office is, a few streets from the city’s famed Gothic cathedral.

“It’s a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time ... it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe.”

Siloe, which specialises in making facsimiles of old manuscripts, has bought the rights to make 898 exact replicas of the Voynich – so faithful that every stain, hole, sewn-up tear in the parchment will be reproduced.

The company always publishes 898 replicas of each work it clones – a number which is a palindrome – after the success of its first facsimile of which they made 696 copies.

The publishing house plans to sell the facsimiles for €7,000 to €8,000 (£6,000 to £6,900) apiece. Nearly 300 people have already put in pre-orders.

Raymond Clemens, curator at the Beinecke library, said Yale decided to have facsimiles done because of the many people who want to consult the fragile manuscript.

“We thought that the facsimile would provide the look and feel of the original for those who were interested,” he said.

“It also enables libraries and museums to have a copy for instructional purposes and we will use the facsimile ourselves to show the manuscript outside of the library to students or others who might be interested.”

The manuscript is named after antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich who bought it in about 1912 from a collection of books belonging to the Jesuits in Italy, and eventually propelled it into the public eye.

Theories abound about who wrote it and what it means.

For a long time, it was believed to be the work of 13th century English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon whose interest in alchemy and magic landed him in jail.

But that theory was discarded when the manuscript was carbon dated and found to have originated between 1404 and 1438.

Others point to a young Leonardo da Vinci, someone who wrote in code to escape the Inquisition, an elaborate joke or even an alien who left the book behind when leaving Earth.

The plants drawn have never been identified, the astronomical charts don’t reveal much. The women also offer few clues.

Scores have tried to decode the Voynich, including top cryptologists such as William Friedman who helped break Japan’s “Purple” cipher during the second world war.

The only person to have made any headway is Indiana Jones. The fictitious archeologist manages to crack it in a novel.

Fiction aside, the Beinecke library gets thousands of emails every month from people claiming to have decoded it, says Rene Zandbergen, a space engineer who runs a recognised blog on the manuscript, which he has consulted several times.

“More than 90% of all the access to their digital library is only for the Voynich manuscript,” he said.

Only slightly bigger than a paperback, the book contains more than 200 pages including several large fold-outs.

It will take Siloe about 18 months to make the first facsimiles, in a painstaking process that started in April when a photographer took detailed snaps of the original in Yale.

Workers at Siloe are now making mock-ups before they finally set about printing out the pages in a way that makes the script and drawings look like the real thing.

The paper they use – made from a paste developed by the company – has been given a special treatment so it feels like the stiff parchment used to write the Voynich.

Once printed, the pages are put together and made to look older.

All the imperfections are re-created using special tools in a process kept firmly secret by Garcia, who in his spare time has also tried his hand at cryptology.

“We call it the Voynich challenge,” he said.

“My business partner ... says the author of the Voynich could also have been a sadist, as he has us all wrapped up in this mystery.”

Egyptian author Ahmed Naji, who was sentenced to two years in prison after a sexually explicit scene from his novel The Use of Life was ruled to have “violat[ed] public modesty”, has had his motion to suspend the prison sentence rejected by a Cairo court.

Naji was given his two-year sentence in February, after an Egyptian citizen claimed that the sexual content in an excerpt from The Use of Life had made his blood pressure drop and his heartbeat fluctuate. More than 500 Egyptian writers and artists, including Ahdaf Soueif, have signed a statement in solidarity with Naji, and in May, more than 120 international writers including Philip Roth, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Michael Chabon put their names to a letter calling for his release.

“Mr Naji is serving a two-year prison sentence for writing a novel that contains references to sex and drugs, subjects so relevant to contemporary life that they are addressed through creative expression worldwide, and clearly fall within Egypt’s constitutional protections for artistic freedom,” said the letter.

But the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy reported that on 27 August, a Cairo court ruled against Naji’s motion for a stay of execution of his sentence, which would have enabled him to be released pending his appeal. The ruling means that the author will continue to serve his two-year sentence, unless a subsequent appeal is successful.

A petition from the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy that condemns Naji’s sentence, calling it unconstitutional and “a travesty for freedom of expression and justice more broadly”, has been signed by almost 9,000 people.

Suzanne Nossel, executive director of PEN America, said in May, when Naji’s brother Mohamed Naji accepted the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award on his behalf, that the author’s sentence “for a crime of the imagination flouts the rule of law and is yet another blow to the dynamic literary and arts scene in Egypt”.

“The name Ahmed Naji, said Nossel, “has become a rallying cry for writers around the world to stand with free-thinking Egyptians who are unwilling to surrender their rights without a fight.”

Emma Thompson is set to return to a starring role on the big screen with an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 2014 novel The Children Act.

According to Deadline, the actor is in talks for the film, which will be directed by Richard Eyre, who hasn’t shot for the big screen since 2008’s The Other Man.

The Children Act follows Judge Fiona Maye, whose commitment to her often tricky cases sometimes strains her marriage. This is pushed to breaking point after she starts work trying to rule whether a 17-year-old with leukaemia should be forced to have potentially life-saving blood transfusions despite the procedure going against his religious beliefs.

Thompson has focused on supporting roles in recent years, including an acclaimed turn as Robert Carlyle’s boozy sex worker mother in The Legend of Barney Thompson and as Bradley Cooper’s psychiatrist in Burnt. She will shortly be seen as an obstetrician in Bridget Jones’s Baby, which she also wrote, and next year as an ageing hippy in Noah Baumbach’s new movie, Yeh Din Ka Kissa.

Zachary Quinto can add another thrilling sci-fi project to his resume — but this time, you won’t see his face.

The Star Trek actor has been cast to narrate an exclusive novella by author John Scalzi, which Scalzi wrote exclusively for Audible. The Dispatcher is set in a contemporary world just like ours, except for one pretty major twist — people who get murdered have been coming back to life. If you die of natural causes or commit suicide, you stay dead, but murder, much to everyone’s surprise, has become nearly impossible to commit. Tony Valdez is a Dispatcher, someone sent to “release” people if, say, they’re in the midst of an operation and are about to die, before they actually go. But when a fellow Dispatcher goes missing, it’s up to Valdez to track him down.

“We were looking for one, obviously someone who has really good acting chops, but also… someone who not only can talk the talk — which they’d have to do with narration — but walks the walk, knows the genre, knows the field, knows about the worlds that we’re going to inhabit,” Scalzi tells EW of the casting process. “So you look at Zachary Quinto: He was in Heroes. He was in Star Trek. He has more than a passing understanding of the world of science fiction and fantasy. He’s done far-future stuff, but he’s also done contemporary urban fantasy in Heroes, which is right down the alley of what The Dispatcher is. When he came up as a possibility, everybody was just like, ‘Oh yeah. That makes total sense.’”

To preorder The Dispatcher in advance of its Oct. 4 release date, head to audible.com/dispatcher.

On Sept. 6, Brooke Barker will publish Sad Animal Facts — an illustrated collection of interesting, though slightly depressing, tidbits about creatures large and small. For instance, did you know cats can get zits? Or that monkeys grow less social with age? Not only are Barker’s cartoons informative and adorable, but the writer/illustrator also includes speech bubbles showing how the animals really feel (or at least, how she thinks they really feel) about these facts of their lives.

EW is excited to exclusively reveal Sad Animal Facts’ absurdly funny book trailer above. And for more peeks at what to expect from the book, check out SadAnimalFacts.com. Pre-order the book here.

Lena Dunham has been sharing photos and hints about the upcoming season of Girls, but in the new issue of Lenny Letter, she updated fans on another project she has in the works: a collection of short stories called Best and Always.

In Tuesday’s newsletter, she and Lenny’s editors revealed the summer fiction issue, which features short stories by Lenny editor Jessica Grose, contributing writer Kaitlyn Greenidge, Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, and Dunham.

In Dunham’s story The Mechanic, which can be read in full at Lenny, Dunham tells the story of a 21-year-old woman dating an older mechanic.

After the issue was sent to inboxes, Dunham posted the news to Instagram and wrote, “This issue was also an exciting lil’ way to let you know that I’m at work on my first fiction collection, Best and Always, to be published next year by Random House. Thrilled to share a hint of it with you.”

RELATED: 55 Books to Read This Fall

Dunham and her writing partner Jenni Konner helm the Lenny imprint at Random House, where her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, was also published.

A once heavily fortified RUC police station, for decades a symbol of division during Northern Ireland’s Troubles, will next month complete a remarkable £4.25m transformation celebrating a village’s most famous son.

The site of Bellaghy station is to become Seamus Heaney HomePlace, an important arts and literary centre exploring the life, literature and inspirations of the Nobel prize-winning poet who died in 2013 and is buried in the nearby church graveyard.

As well as being a tourist draw it will be an important community resource and the symbolism of it being a former RUC station, from division to unity, is important, said Heaney’s son Michael.

“I think there is something in that,” he said. “I hope there is anyway.”

The Heaney family have given their blessing to a project driven and mainly funded by Mid-Ulster Council.

“I think dad would be happy,” said Michael. “The truth of the matter is I think he might be slightly unnerved by the scale of the undertaking. I don’t mean that in a bad way but his antennae would be up. Equally if they weren’t doing anything he might have raised an eyebrow too. Who knows?”

At the centre’s core will be a permanent exhibition documenting Heaney’s life and poems, with many personal artefacts, such as his duffel coat and dozens of family photographs.

There will also video recordings from friends and neighbours, world leaders and cultural figures, with their own Heaney stories; audio of the poet himself reading his poems; and an elevated viewing platform with views across the south Derry countryside that inspired so much of his work.

Heaney, Ireland’s first Nobel-winning poet since WB Yeats, was born in his family’s farmhouse Mossbawn, near Castledawson, in 1939. He grew up in the nearby village of Bellaghy, from where he drew so much inspiration in his poetry.

“It wasn’t just a desiccated memory,” said Michael. “It was a living place and that is important … he left there as a child but he was writing about it 50 years later. There is a lot of family up there as well, we’re the kind of Dublin outpost.”

Michael recalls spending family summer holidays in Bellaghy. “There are a lot of childhood memories,” although it was mostly playing in the fields, he said. “It sounds like a cliche but being honest there wasn’t a lot else to do, I suppose there was the odd British army patrol nearby, which rather added to the idyllic nature of it.”

Anne-Marie Campbell, Mid-Ulster council’s director of arts and culture, said Heaney was an incredibly important figure for the area. “We as a council, but also as a people, are very proud of him and have a lot of affection and warmth for him. A lot of people in our area knew him … he was a a very ordinary man who could talk to anybody at any level.”

As well as the Heaney exhibition – designed by Tandem Design, the company responsible for Belfast’s Titanic exhibition – there will be a 189-seat performing arts space, a library, education and learning spaces, the obligatory cafe and an annex for community use.

The library will include the desk Heaney used in his attic study – a place Heaney called his “hutch” – and a large selection of books from his home, all donated by the Heaney family.

It is a big building to play with. The centre will take up 2,000 sq metres (21,527 sq ft), and Campbell hopes the space is being well used. “It is one of our key projects, we feel incredibly privileged but we feel a great responsibility as well. We’ve worked closely with the family and we see it as an important driver of culture and the arts in the area.”

A cultural programme for HomePlace’s first year has been developed by Seán Doran, formerly in charge at English National Opera, and Liam Browne, former director of the Dublin Writers Festival. It will be based around Heaney’s 12 published volumes and titled 12 Months, 12 Books – kicking off with Death of a Naturalist in October and finishing with Human Chain in September 2017.

Another part of the project will be ‘My Seamus Heaney Story’ with the centre encouraging everyone who knew him to contribute a story online.

The opening weekend on 30 September will include performances by the singer-songwriter Paul Brady and a classical music experience called ‘Bach to Broagh’ with cellist Christian Poltéra playing three of Bach’s cello suites intercut with Heaney poems.

The project has been supported by poets such as Michael Longley, one of Heaney’s oldest friends, who said he hoped HomePlace “will become an echo chamber for the poet’s beautiful lines.”

• HomePlace opens 30 September.

The words of author John le Carré helped earn Tom Hiddleston his first Emmy nomination, so it’s natural the actor gives back. In honor of the publication of Carré’s first memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life, Hiddleston performed a dramatic reading of The Night Manager. 

The Guardian published video of the reading online, proving Hiddleston can still give us goosebumps even without a weekly audience. AMC adapted the novel into a six-part miniseries featuring the actors as Jonathan Pine, a former soldier and current night manager of a luxury hotel who works to bring down an international arms dealer. 

Hiddleston was nominated for an Emmy in the limited series category alongside Bryan Cranston (All the Way), Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock: The Abominable Bride), Idris Elba (Luther), Cuba Gooding Jr. (The People Vs. O.J. Simpson), and Courtney B. Vance (The People Vs. O.J. Simpson).

Watch the video below.  

“I loved playing The Night Manager, and I’m so proud of The Night Manager,” Hiddleston told EW of his nomination. “It was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my short life as an actor.”

Emily Brontë may have had Asperger syndrome, according to the literary biographer Claire Harman.

At an event at the Edinburgh international book festival, Harman, author of the recent biography Charlotte Brontë: A Life, said several of Emily’s character traits, including her genius, her dislike of leaving home, her discomfort in social situations and her sudden bursts of anger and frustration could have been symptoms of Asperger’s.

One famous case of Emily’s anger was recorded by Charlotte Brontë’s first biographer and fellow author Elizabeth Gaskell, who in her 1857 biography recalled how the family dog was left “half blind and stupefied” after Emily punched it in the face for dirtying the laundry. But Harman said on Sunday that Gaskell related the incident as “just a sign of Emily’s strength of character”.

“It is actually very disturbing. I think Charlotte and everybody was quite frightened of Emily. I think she was an Asperger’s-ey person,” Harman said. “She was such a genius and had total imaginative freedom ... Containing Emily, protecting Emily, not being alarmed by Emily, was a big project for the whole household. She’s an absolutely fascinating person – a very troubling presence, though.”

Even more than reclusive Charlotte, Emily hated leaving home, Harman said, which was why they hoped, for a while, to start a school from their home at Haworth, West Yorkshire.

At the event, Harman also dismissed the theory that all the Brontë books were written by one sibling, and that Emily’s brother Branwell wrote part of Wuthering Heights – an idea Harman said only existed because the novel was “so peculiar”.

“Being Emily Brontë is enough. Emily Brontë was an amazing genius. One of the problems of writing about Charlotte Brontë was, I thought, ‘Hang on, being Emily Bronte’s sister would be enough to have a book written about you, wouldn’t it?’” Harman said.

“People do tend to sentimentalise [Emily]. They say their favourite romantic novel is Wuthering Heights, but it is so full of violence, so full of things I would not classify as romantic at all.”

The Wuthering Heights author shared many behavioural qualities with her father Patrick. “He gave them an immense latitude in terms of his interest in issues of the day that transferred very readily. The children liked nothing more than to read a parliamentary report around the fireside. They were a very unusual family in that respect, and he did not restrain them intellectually. But he was a very chilly man, very emotionally strange. He was clearly hugely egotistical and I think, also a bit Asperger’s-ey too.”

After writing the biography of Charlotte in the lead-up to her 200th birthday this year, Harman said she was looking forward to the inevitable range of biographies about Emily in two year times. “It is Emily Brontë’s bicentenary in 2018 – it’s too late for me to write another book I’m afraid, but I am looking forward to what people produce because she is such an extraordinary person.”

Every American story is, whether certain megaphoned public figures like to be reminded or not, at some point an immigrant story. And Jende Jonga, the Cameroon-born hero of Imbolo Mbue’s furiously anticipated debut, fits neatly into the slipstream of the millions who have come before him—far-flung hopefuls fleeing chaos and hardship for a place where the pursuit of happiness isn’t just words enshrined on a monument but an unalienable right.

Though alien, of course, is exactly how many of them feel when they arrive: unmoored, unseen, unassimilated. Jende lands in New York City in 2004 with more than some but less than most; he has a temporary visa and a few tenuous connections. Still, within three years he’s managed to earn enough at odd jobs to bring over his girlfriend, Neni, and their son, Liomi, and lucked into a coveted post as a driver for a wealthy executive, a brusque but not unfriendly man named Clark Edwards. The splendor of the Edwardses’ world—the penthouse with park views, the sprawling second home in the Hamptons, the clothes and toys and countless other luxuries they treat as thoughtlessly as dollar bills—stands in stark contrast to the Jongas’ careful budgeting and cramped Harlem apartment. But ordinary abundance seduces them too, to different degrees: Liomi learns to love sugar cereals and lose his accent, while Neni, newly pregnant, receives the castoffs that Mrs. Edwards casually passes along like holy totems—material down payments on a brighter, more prosperous future. For Jende, his family’s stability is its own reward; the most elusive luxury is a green card.

Certain historical realities of 2008—that a black man with African heritage is running for President of the United States and, less auspiciously, that the financial company Clark works for is Lehman Brothers—do come into play. Behold the Dreamers’ heart, though, belongs to the struggles and small triumphs of the Jongas, which Mbue traces in clean, quick-moving paragraphs. (The Edwardses, for the most part, remain sketches.) If the book ultimately falls short of the emotional impact its sweeping premise and seven-figure advance portend, it’s still a fresh, engaging entry in the eternally evolving narrative of what it means to be an American—and how human beings, not laws or dogma, define liberty.

Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina features passionate love, abject misery and a hundred emotions in between. The epic romantic saga does not, traditionally, involve any inline skating, but that will change when a new musical version hits the Moscow stage this autumn.

Anna Karenina the musical will open at the Moscow Operetta theatre in October, with specially written music and a new libretto. The producers say that although the whole of Tolstoy’s sprawling novel cannot fit into a two-hour show, they remain faithful to the text throughout. The cast will wear costumes that are “of the period, but with elements of haute couture”.

Not all the musical takes place on inline skates, which are used in place of ice skates for winter scenes. At a rehearsal this week, the cast went through a scene set at a Moscow ice rink, in which wealthy landowner Levin proposes to Kitty. She turns him down as couples around them perform acrobatic skating routines.

Tolstoy’s novel has been adapted for screen and stage on numerous occasions. There have also been operatic and musical renditions, though none have become well known. In a 2012 film version, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard and starring Keira Knightley in the title role, the whole action takes place inside a theatre.

“The novel has everything. It’s maybe the most detailed exploration of relations between men and women,” said Vladimir Tartakovsky, the director of the Operetta theatre and one of the musical’s producers.

Tartakovsky said the character of Anna’s husband, Karenin – who has been portrayed as an unsympathetic villain in some film versions – is closer to the original in their musical; he can be sympathised with as a victim of his social situation.

“None of the characters are simplistic – they make the viewer think, and people can empathise with parts of all the characters,” said Alexei Bolonin, one of the co-producers of the musical.

Bolonin and Tartakovsky have staged several musicals at the Operetta theatre, including Count Orlov, a semi-factual tale about one of Catherine the Great’s nobles, which ran for four years and sold nearly 1m tickets.

Last year, a musical version of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment also appeared on the Moscow stage. Attempts to launch western musicals, such as Chicago, have been less successful in Moscow.

Until recently, there was little to fill the gap between pop music and high culture: there are four opera houses in Moscow but only three theatres that put on musicals. Bolonin said the popularity of musicals as a genre was growing in Russia.

“When we started in 1999, we were the only people doing it and people would come from the street to auditions with no practice at all,” he said. More than 1,000 people auditioned for Anna Karenina and most of them had some musical theatre experience.

Rehearsals will continue until October, when the musical opens. The producers hope that, like their previous shows, this one will sell out for months, if not years.

As for the best-known scene in the novel, in which Tolstoy’s heroine ends her life by throwing herself under a train, the producers declined to elaborate on exactly how the tragedy would unfold on stage.

“It will end in the same way as the novel. There will be a train. And it will be very emotional and very theatrical,” said Tartakovsky.

Declaring that “I like travelling extremely & have no reason to complain of having had too little of it, having now gone through all the Turkish Dominions in Europe”, the only surviving letter written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu from Turkey has gone up for sale.

Written in April 1717 from Adrianople, now Edirne, to her long-time correspondent Mrs Frances Hewet, the letter sees Lady Mary talk of her “Journeys through Hungary, Bohemia, & the whole Tour of Germany”. Turkey, she tells her “dear” Mrs Hewet, “is one of [the] finest in the world; hitherto all I see is so new to me, it is like a fresh scene of an opera every day”. Her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, was ambassador to Turkey at the time.

The letter also mentions her son, saying that he “never was better in his life”. Lady Mary vaccinated her son against smallpox in Turkey.

“In this letter she confirms his continued health, which suggests that this letter dates from after his inoculation,” said the antiquarian bookseller Bernard Quaritch, which has put the letter up for sale for £5,000.

Lady Mary would go on in England in 1721, in the middle of a smallpox epidemic, to have her daughter inoculated against the disease. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “the practice of inoculating children spread rapidly among those who knew Lady Mary and who had already been bereaved by the disease”. “Lady Mary’s most important activity during the 1720s, for the world if not for herself, was the introduction to western medicine of inoculation against smallpox,” says the dictionary of the poet and letter writer, who was a friend of Alexander Pope but became estranged, the latter attacking Lady Mary in his Dunciad in 1728.

Bernard Quaritch called the letter “unique”, as it is the only original to survive of all those Lady Mary wrote from Turkey. “It’s a wonderful thing,” said bookseller Mark James. “She was an incredible woman.”

The 18th-century missive is the star of a new catalogue from Bernard Quaritch celebrating 250 years of women travellers. The catalogue also features a copy of Margaret Mee’s Flowers of the Brazilian Forest, one of only 400. Published in 1968, her book identifies three flowers previously unknown to science. It also includes a rare first edition of Baghdad Sketches, the first book by British writer and explorer Freya Stark, who would go on to be one of the first non-Arabians to travel through the southern Arabian Deserts.

The sale includes a 1763 second edition of Lady Mary’s Embassy Letters, about her travels with her husband on his posting to Turkey. The author rewrote her letters on her return to England and circulated them to her friends in a manuscript. They were published after her death and proved hugely successful, going through three editions in 1763.

James pointed to a preface to the letters written by Mary Astell in 1724, arguing that female travel writers are superior to their male counterparts. “I confess, I am malicious enough to desire that the world should see to how much better purpose the ladies travel than their lords; and that, whilst it is surfeited with Male-Travels, all in the same tone and stuffed with the same trifles; a lady has the skill to strike out a new path, and to embellish a worn-out subject, with variety of fresh and elegant entertainment,” writes Astell.

“If you say women travellers, people tend to think of those from the second half of the 19th century,” said James. “But we wanted to stretch out the spectrum, to pull it back and forward, so we’re covering 250 years.”

A documentary about Anne Frank, shot in Gaza and starring Palestinian girls reading from the German-born Jew’s diary, has been secretly screened in Iran. It’s an event Deadline has called a “clandestine cultural breakthrough” because the country’s Supreme Leader is a Holocaust denier.

Anne Frank: Then and Now was filmed during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. The film is split between an educational documentary about Frank’s time hiding from the Nazis in occupied Holland and excerpts from the diary acted by two Israelis and eight Palestinian girls, one of whom performs in front of the rubble from an Israeli airstrike.

The screening, details of which have been kept secret to protect the organisers, was followed by a one-hour talk about Frank led by the film’s Croatian director Jakov Sedlar.

“We spoke a lot about the influence of art in today’s world,” he told Deadline. “At the end, one of students told me: ‘Thanks for teaching us about something new.’”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, marked Holocaust Memorial Day this year by publishing a video questioning whether the Holocaust took place.

“It is not clear whether the core of this matter is a reality or not,” he says in a video called Are the Dark Ages Over? “Even if it is a reality, it is not clear how it happened.”

Khamenei went on to complain that expressing doubt about the Holocaust is “considered a great sin” in the west, before attacking the “lying” western powers that support the “fake Zionist regime”.

Sedlar, who praised the organisers of the Anne Frank: Then and Now screening for their bravery, said he hoped the film would help spread information about the events of the Holocaust in Iran.

“Tell your friends about Anne Frank,” he told the crowd. “Try to find details of her life; try to learn something about the Holocaust.”

Drowning in six-figure student-loan debt, Greenwood was bemoaning her situation over dinner when a friend suggested, cheekily, that she fake her own death. The offhand comment struck a nerve: “From bit player in your life, you become the auteur. From being pressed up against a wall, you carve a tunnel,” she says. Her obsession with the idea led to this bizarre exposé of the disappearance industry. In it she grills “privacy consultants” who help people vanish, interviews investigators who specialize in death fraud, and even explores black-market morgues in the Philippines where people can obtain bogus death certificates—for a price. Don’t mistake this for a how-to manual, though. Greenwood herself wasn’t seriously tempted to disappear. “Nothing is ever free,” she says, surveying the broken families left behind when someone fakes their own death. “There is no such thing as getting away with it.” A–

Following the last issue of Hellboy in Hell, the decades-long main story of Hellboy has finally been concluded. This month also sees the release of the final issue of the solo Abe Sapien series. It’s the end of an era, but the so-called “Mignolaverse” isn’t quite finished yet. This month also sees the launch of two new miniseries set in the Hellboy world: Witchfinder: City of the Dead, and Hellboy and the BPRD 1954: The Black Sun. Although Hellboy creator Mike Mignola is involved in both series, they also bring in some new blood: iZombie co-creator Chris Roberson is co-writing both, while Ben Stenbeck draws Witchfinder and Stephen Green draws Hellboy and the BPRD 1954. 

“I’m very happy to have these books in the hands of really good writers,” Mignola told EW back in May. “Chris and I had a lot of conversations about what he’s interested in doing. My involvement is fun. I get to sit around and make sh– up, and then get out of their way while they do the hard stuff.”

The final issue of Abe Sapien, co-written by Mignola and Scott Allie, finds the aquatic hero going up against his ultimate nemesis, a necromancer who wants to use Abe’s destiny for his own ends. Abe, like Hellboy, was destined to bring great evil on the world, and must now reckon with the consequences of his refusal.

While Abe Sapien concludes near the end of the Hellboy universe story, as heroes contend with the effects of the apocalypse, both Witchfinder and Hellboy and the BPRD 1954 go back in time to explore other facets of this rich fictional world. Hellboy and the BPRD finds the big red guy going up north to investigate some strange sightings. The arctic is still a relatively untapped mine of mythology in the Hellboy universe; looks like readers will finally get a glimpse of the Mignolaverse take on yetis and other icy monsters. Witchfinder, meanwhile, goes back in time to Victorian London and follows Sir Edward Grey, Her Majesty’s premier occult detective, as he deals with a sudden zombie outbreak.

“We know from other stories a few details about Grey’s later life, including how he dies, but there’s a lot of empty space on that map that can be filled in,” Roberson told EW back in May. “With Scott and Mike’s input and feedback, I’ve come up with a rough outline for Sir Edward’s globe-trotting adventures all the way through his final battle in 1916, and the seeds for a lot of that are planted in City of the Dead.”

Check out exclusive previews of the three issues below. Witchfinder: City of the Dead #1 and Abe Sapien #36 are both out Aug. 31, while Hellboy and the BPRD #1 hits stands Sep. 21.

On Aug. 30, the highly anticipated sequel to Sabaa Tahir’s smash hit An Ember in the Ashes will finally hit shelves. But before you can get your hands on A Torch Against the Night, EW is thrilled to share three exclusive excerpts from the audiobook (also out Aug. 30), so you can hear how three characters, Laia (read by Fiona Hardingham), Elias (read by Steve West), and Helene (read by Katharine McEwan), will sound speaking from his or her own perspective.

Check out the clips below, and pre-order your copies of the book and audiobook here. And if you missed the exclusive excerpt from An Ember in the Ashes we ran back in April, head here to catch up.

Laia

Elias

Helene

In a quest that calls for the detective skills of fictional sleuths from time past, a publisher has launched a search for the surviving relatives of a crime novelist whose novels have been out of print for almost 80 years.

Clifton Robbins published nine novels between 1931 and 1940, five of which featured London barrister-turned-detective Clay Harrison. Scott Pack, co-founder and publisher at Canelo’s imprint Abandoned Bookshop, first discovered Robbins in a secondhand bookshop nearly 20 years ago, and said he had “spent almost as long trying to track down the author or his family”.

Pack has just published the first two Clay Harrison novels, Dusty Death and The Man Without a Face, as ebooks, but says the publisher will keep aside royalties from the sale of the books in the hope that one of Robbins’s relatives comes forward to claim them. In the first, Harrison is investigating an apparent suicide in a London suburb and ends up on the trail of a drugs cartel. In the second, he and his clerk Henry witness a murder during a pageant at a stately home.

“His novels, although very much of their time, are wonderful crime capers with a detective, in Clay Harrison, every bit as compelling as Lord Peter Wimsey or Paul Temple. I am sure modern readers will take to him, and his sidekick, Henry,” said Pack.

Canelo co-founder Michael Bhaskar said that attempts to trace Robbins’s descendants had proved entirely fruitless so far. All the publisher knows is that the author appears to have been born in London in 1890, that he studied in Cambridge and that he worked as a journalist. None of his books were reprinted after 1940, and he published nothing new after that date. Some records suggest he died in 1944, others that he made it until 1964, but despite all of the publisher’s efforts, nothing else is known about the writer.

“It’s a complete mystery who he is,” said Bhaskar. “Scott’s been in archives, he’s looked through newspapers from the time searching for notices of his death, he’s spoken to people all around the country, put notices up, but there’s been nothing. The trail has gone cold. It’s a very unusual situation - usually when a book is in copyright, it’s known who owns it. We’re hoping that opening this up to the general public will help us find a lead.”

Canelo, a digital-only publisher, offers its authors a royalty starting at 50% of receipts. “Our royalties are more substantial than most … [they] will be there waiting if someone comes forward, and it will go on accruing if they don’t,” said Bhaskar. “As a publisher, we respect copyright and we want to do everything we can to find these people. Hopefully we’ll see someone come forward and say ‘this was my great-uncle’ or something.”

Bhaskar compared Robbins’s writing to that of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, “but with more of an edge”. (“‘Drugs?’ ‘Yes, pounds of them. Enough to kill hundreds, sir,’” opens Dusty Death in Abandoned Bookshop’s new edition, which also features an appeal for information about Robbins or his family.)

As for the author himself, “from his books, you get the sense that he might have been a bit of a character – there are a lot of dark shenanigans and drugs … he’s one of those people who exists on the fringes of the establishment, and flirts with the darker side as well,” said the publisher.

• If you have any information about Clifton Robbins, email hello@abandonedbookshop.com

The renowned Turkish novelist Aslı Erdoğan says she is facing “permanent damage” from the treatment she is receiving in prison after her arrest last week.

Erdoğan, an award-winning and celebrated Turkish novelist, was arrested in her home on the night of 16 August, according to a statement from her French publisher Actes Sud. A columnist and member of the pro-Kurdish opposition daily Özgür Gündem’s advisory board, which was shut down under the state of emergency that followed the failed coup of 15 July, her arrest came alongside that of more than 20 other journalists and employees of the paper. She was subsequently charged with “membership of a terrorist organisation” and “undermining national unity”.

Erdoğan, whom the French literary magazine Lire named as one of the 50 most promising authors of the future, told the daily Hürriyet through her lawyer, Nesrullah Oğuz, that she was being treated in prison “in a way that will leave permanent damage on my body”. She said she was sleeping in a bed that had previously been urinated in, and that she was not able to get access to her medication.

“My pancreas and digestive system don’t work properly, but my medicine has not been given to me for five days. I am diabetic and I need special nutrition. But in jail I am only able to eat yoghurt,” she said. “Also, even though I suffer from asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, I have not been allowed access to open air [since entering prison].”

Her detention has prompted a wave of calls for her release. “With the arrest of one of the nation’s most celebrated and internationally known authors, we can see that no poet, novelist, or playwright is safe in [President] Erdoğan’s Turkey,” said the novelist and translator Maureen Freely, president of English PEN, which is calling for the immediate release of those detained following the raid on Özgür Gündem “solely in connection with their work or peaceful exercise of their right to freedom of expression”.

A petition calling for Erdoğan’s release has been signed by almost 25,000 people. Describing her as “one of the world’s most notable novelists”, the petition says that “her only wish for her country is to live in a better, more democratic and civilised society”, and that she “produces work towards this wish while promoting Turkish literature globally”.

PEN International said it was “deeply concerned” for her health, describing the conditions in which she is being held as “wholly unacceptable” and calling on the Turkish authorities “to immediately provide better conditions [and] ensure immediate access to medication and to her doctors as a matter of extreme urgency”.

Sahar Halaimzai, PEN International campaigns manager, said: “The crackdown on free speech that we are witnessing in Turkey is unprecedented in the country’s modern history. The attempted coup does not justify the attack against all dissenting and critical voices. Aslı Erdoğan is one of dozens of journalists currently behind bars in Turkey, held in difficult conditions and facing an uncertain fate. We strongly urge the Turkish government to halt this assault on free speech and human rights, and comply with their obligations under international law during this period of emergency.”

Erdoğan told Hürriyet that she was aware of the solidarity being shown for her. “I’m aware that great efforts are being spent. I’m aware of the sincerity and feelings in the messages that I receive. It may sound very vain, but I thank you very much,” she said.

Her arrest follows the Turkish government’s closure of 29 publishers under the state of emergency law. The move has been condemned by publishers around the world, with the PEN International Publishers Circle saying that “while recognising the right of the Turkish authorities to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the failed coup, [we] call on the Turkish authorities not to use the state of emergency to restrict lawful freedom of expression and to ensure that writers and publishers are able to freely carry out their activities”.

Sam Mendes is in talks to direct a live-action adaptation of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach.

According to Deadline, the Oscar-winning director of American Beauty is a favourite for the project being developed at Disney. The script has been written by Nick Hornby, whose recent film credits include Brooklyn and Wild.

The film would join the studio’s long slate of live-action takes on their animated films after Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella and Pete’s Dragon, with Beauty and the Beast and Peter Pan on the way. The original adaptation was released in 1996 and featured the voices of Susan Sarandon, Simon Callow and Joanna Lumley.

The news follows an underwhelming result at the box office for Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG, which made $53m (£40m) in the US from a $140m budget.

Mendes’s most recent credits are the Bond thrillers Skyfall and Spectre. In May, he recently announced that he will not be making any more films in the franchise. “It was an incredible adventure, I loved every second of it,” he said. “But I think it’s time for somebody else”.

The proportion of adults visiting public libraries in England has fallen by almost a third over the last decade, according to a new government report, although usage in the country’s most deprived areas has remained stable.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has measured the public’s usage of libraries in England since 2005. In the 12 months to March 2016, it reported that just 33.4% of adults had used a public library, compared with 48.2% of adults in 2005/2006, when the survey began. This marks a drop of 30.7% over the decade, and is the first time the government department has highlighted a “significant decrease” in the proportion of adults who used public libraries. In comparison, the proportion of adults visiting heritage sites, museums and galleries increased over the decade.

The report reveals that although declines have been seen across all demographic groups over the last decade, the largest declines are for the “urban prosperity” group, down from 57.3% to 37.8%, and the “wealthy achievers” group, down from 50.9% to 33.5%.

By contrast, adult library users in the “hard-pressed” group fell by just seven percentage points over the same period, from 40.9% to 33.5%.

Considering England geographically, a similar pattern is seen. Adults in the least deprived areas of England saw their library usage decline the most over the decade, from 46.3% to 31.4%, while according to the report, library usage in the five most deprived areas of the country “remained reasonably stable”.

“Proportionate use of libraries in the most deprived areas of England is strong, demonstrating the role these unique public services play in improving life chances through literacy, learning and access to knowledge for those communities with the most to gain,” said Mark Taylor, spokesperson for the Chartered Institute of Library Professionals.

“By law, our libraries are there for everyone in the local area that wants to use them and these figures strengthen the case for rapid modernisation of library services across the country – by extending opening hours, improving digital services and the availability of ebooks, and investing in books, buildings and good design.”

The DCMS report also revealed a decrease in the proportion of working adults using public library services over the last two years, from 33.4% in 2013/2014 to 31% in 2015/2016. The proportion of non-working adults has remained stable, with 37.1% using a library in the last year. The report also showed that more adults from the black and minority ethnic group (45.6%) have used a public library service in the last year than adults from the white ethnic group (31.6%).

As libraries close all around the UK – according to the monitoring website Public Libraries News 72 libraries and five mobile libraries have come under threat since April – libraries campaigner Desmond Clarke said that the new minister for libraries, Rob Wilson, needs to ask what is being done to reverse the decline, because “for those responsible for the service, to continue to ignore the crisis is unacceptable”.

He added: “It is irresponsible of the Library Taskforce not to have properly researched the reasons for such a ‘significant’ decline in library usage and not to have put in place an effective plan to attract back adult users. The crisis facing public libraries should be at the very top of their agenda. The new minister needs to tell them to get their act together.”

Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy’s action hero, is coming to TV in a 10-part series commissioned by Amazon.

Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is set to star John Krasinski, who is best known for playing a significantly more sedentary role in the US version of The Office but also starred in the critically panned action movie 13 Hours: the Secret Soldiers of Benghazi earlier this year.

The Amazon show is billed as a “reimagining” of Ryan, charting the ex-marine’s early rise as an analyst for the CIA.

The character of Ryan has a long cinematic history, having previously been played by Alec Baldwin, Ben Affleck, Chris Pine and Harrison Ford.

Though Baldwin first played the character in Hunt for Red October in 1990, it was Ford who popularised him as the main event in the early 90s, first in Patriot Games and then Clear and Present Danger.

Between them the five films featuring Ryan have taken more than $922m (£710m) at the box office worldwide. Clancy has written nine books charting Ryan’s rise, which eventually sees him become US president.

Paramount and Skydance Television will co-produce the show, which will be based on a story developed by executive producers Carlton Cuse, who worked on Lost, and Almost Human’s Graham Roland. Action supremo Michael Bay, who directed 13 Hours and the Transformers films, was also named among the executive producers.

“We’re excited to add the Jack Ryan global franchise to our robust originals pipeline,” said Amazon Studios head Roy Price.

“Our customers will enjoy a compelling adaptation of the action-packed spy thriller book series, further raising the bar for the quality level of storytelling that has made Prime Video a leading destination for content.”

A set of antlers stolen by the late Hunter S Thompson from the home of Ernest Hemingway has been returned to the Nobel laureate’s family by the gonzo journalist’s widow.

Anita Thompson told the website BroBible that Thompson took the elk antlers from Hemingway’s home in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1964. Hemingway shot himself in the home in 1961. Thompson visited three years later, to write an essay about his visit, What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?, exploring “just what it was about this outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive chord in America’s most famous writer”.

The young man who would go on to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and to invent gonzo journalism also, according to his widow Anita Thompson, “got caught up in the moment” and stole the antlers, going on to hang them in his own garage. In his essay, Thompson refers to “a big pair of elk horns over the front door” in Hemingway’s “comfortable-looking chalet”.

Anita Thompson told Brandon Wenerd at BroBible that her late husband, who killed himself in 2005, “had so much respect for Hemingway” and “was actually very embarrassed” by his actions.

The couple had “planned to take a road trip and quietly return them, and not make a thing of it”, she said, but never did. This year, she got in touch with the Hemingway family, and earlier this month drove the antlers back to Ketchum – now owned by charity the Nature Conservancy – herself.

“They were warm and kind of tickled … they were so open and grateful, there was no weirdness,” she told Wenerd, a long-time friend, of the Hemingway family’s reaction. “Still, it’s something that was stolen from the home. They were grateful to have them back. They had heard rumours. Sean Hemingway, the grandson, was the first family member that I’d heard from. He spoke with other Hemingway family members and he said that everyone agreed that he should have them. He lives in New York, where he curates a museum. So now that I’m back from Ketchum we’re actually shipping them to Sean.”

• In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.

Bob Odenkirk is opening the door for fans to know the actor behind the Emmy-winning role on Better Call Saul in a book of personal essays.

Random House has acquired the collection, which will be a comic exploration of Odenkirk’s life and career. Comprised of personal essays, the book will take the reader on a journey of the actor’s beginnings in improv to a Golden Globe nominated performer. “A comic ‘bildungsroman’, if you will - defined by Webster’s Dictionary as ‘a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character,’” said Odenkirk in a release. “Except, this will be more memoir and the main character, Bob Odenkirk (actor, writer, comedian, gadabout), doesn’t grow morally or psychologically.”

While the actor has been working in sketch and improv since his early days at Chicago’s Second City, he began his journey in the industry through writing and acting for Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Mr. Show. He originated the role of Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad.

The untitled project will allow a look in the past to Odenkirk’s early career, with multiple guest starring roles, including Everybody Loves Raymond, 3rd Rock from the Sun and Futurama. “I’ve been a fan of Bob’s since he ‘shook the crime stick’ on Mr. Show, and it’s been remarkably satisfying to watch him break through as JimmyMcGill/Saul Goodman,” said Random House Executive Editor Ben Greenberg in a statement. “This book will give Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fans who might not know Bob’s past life a look at the remarkable writer and comedic mind hiding just beneath the character.”

Marie Lu is gearing up for the release of her final novel in her Young Elites series — The Midnight Star — which drops Oct. 11. Adeline Amouteru’s story continues in this last installment. She still reigns as the White Wolf, but she’s getting crueler by the conquest, and her darkness threatens to spin out of control. But when a new enemy emerges, Adelina and her Roses must ally with the Daggers — until it’s not clear whether the new threat or the new alliance is the real thing to fear.

To celebrate this thrilling conclusion to Lu’s best-selling series, EW is excited to share an exclusive excerpt from The Midnight Star. And be sure to check out Lu’s tour dates below to see if she’s coming to a city near you on her fall book tour.

Marie Lu’s The Midnight Star Tour Dates

Tuesday, October 11^th
6:00 PM
Books of Wonder
18 W 18th St
New York, NY 10011

Wednesday, October 12^th
7:00 PM
Gibson’s Bookstore
45 S Main St
Concord, NH 03301

Thursday, October 13^th
7:00 PM
Barnes & Noble
7851 L Tysons Corner Center
Tysons Corner, VA

Friday, October 14^th
7:00 PM
Quail Ridge Books
4381-105 Lassiter at North Hills Ave
Raleigh, NC 27609

Saturday, October 15^th
2:00 PM
Books A Million
2605 W Osceola Pkwy,
Kissimmee, FL 34741

Monday, October 17^th
7:00 PM
with Margaret Stohl
BookPeople
603 N Lamar Blvd
Austin, TX 78703

Tuesday, October 18^th
6:30 PM
Berkeley Public Library
North Berkeley Branch
1170 The Alameda (at Hopkins)
Berkeley, CA 94707

Wednesday, October 19^th
7:00 PM
Keplers
1010 El Camino Real,
Menlo Park, CA 94025

Friday, October 21^st
4:30 PM
Lake Forest Bookstore
662 N Western Ave,
Lake Forest, IL 60045

Saturday, October 22^nd
Wisconsin Book Festival
Madison, WI

Sunday, October 23^rd
2:00 PM
With Kiersten White, Catherine Egan and Morgan Rhodes
Chapters Brampton
Market Hall, 52 Quarry Edge Drive
Brampton, ON

Tuesday, October 25^th
7:30 PM
With Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
Mysterious Galaxy
5943 Balboa Avenue #100
San Diego, CA 92111

Excerpt from The Midnight Star by Marie Lu

Chapter 2

Raffaele Laurent Bessette

The sound of the surf outside reminds Raffaele of stormy nights at the Estenzian harbor. Here in the Sunland nation of Tamoura, though, there are no canals, no gondolas that have drifted away from their moorings to bob alongside the stone walls. There is only a beach of red and gold sand, and land dotted with low shrubs and sparse trees. High on a hill, a sprawling palace overlooks the ocean, its silhouette black in the night, its famous entrance illuminated by the glow of lanterns.

Tonight, a warm early spring breeze comes in through the windows of one of the palace apartments, and the candles burn low. Enzo Valenciano sits on a gilded chair, his figure hunched over, his arms resting on his knees. Waves of his dark hair fall over his face, and his jaw is clenched tight. His eyes stay shut in pain, his cheeks moist with tears.

Raffaele kneels before him, carefully undoing the white cloth bandages that run all the way up to the prince’s elbows. The smell of burned flesh and cloyingly sweet ointment fills the room. Every time Raffaele pulls the bandage from a seg­ment of Enzo’s arm, tugging on the wounded skin as it goes, Enzo’s jaw tightens. His shirt hangs loose, slick with sweat. Raffaele winds the bandages in a roll. He can sense the agony hovering over the prince, and the feeling scalds his own heart as surely as if he were wounded himself.

Underneath the bandages, Enzo’s arms are a mass of burns that never seem to heal. The original scars and wounds that had always covered the prince’s hands have now spread up­ward, aggravated by his spectacular display during the battle against Adelina in the Estenzian harbor. Destroying almost all of Queen Maeve’s Beldish navy with fire has taken its toll.

A piece of skin tears away with the bandages. Enzo utters a soft groan.

Raffaele flinches at the sight of the charred flesh. “Do you want to rest for a moment?” he asks.

“No,” Enzo replies through clenched teeth.

Raffaele obeys. Slowly, painstakingly, he removes the last of the bandages from Enzo’s right arm. Both of the prince’s arms are now exposed.

Raffaele lets out a sigh, then reaches for the bowl of cool, clean water sitting beside him. He places the bowl in Enzo’s lap. “Here,” he says. “Soak.”

Enzo eases his arms into the cool water. He slowly ex­hales. They sit in silence for a while, letting the minutes drag on. Raffaele watches Enzo closely. Day by day, the prince has grown more withdrawn, his eyes turned frequently and longingly to the sea. There is a new energy in the air that Raffaele cannot quite put his finger on.

“You still feel her pull?” Raffaele asks at last.

Enzo nods. He turns instinctively toward the window again, in the direction of the ocean. Another long moment passes before he answers. “Some days, it is quiet,” he says. “Not tonight.”

Raffaele waits for him to continue, but Enzo falls back into his deep silence again, his attention still on the ocean outside. Raffaele wonders whom Enzo is thinking about. It is not Adelina, but a girl long gone, from a happier time in his past.

After a while, Raffaele takes the bowl of water away and gently dabs Enzo’s arms dry, then applies a layer of ointment to the burned skin. It is an old salve that Raffaele used to request back at the Fortunata Court, when Enzo would visit him at night to have his hands bandaged. Now the court is gone. Queen Maeve has returned to Beldain to lick her wounds and restore her navy. And the Daggers have come here, to Tamoura—what is left of Tamoura, at any rate. Adelina’s Inquisitors dot the hills in northern Tamoura, hold­ing strong.

“Any news of Adelina?” Enzo asks as Raffaele reaches for a fresh set of bandages.

“Dumor’s capital has fallen to her army,” Raffaele replies. “She rules all of the Sealands now.”

Enzo looks back to the sea, as if searching again for the eternal pull between him and the White Wolf, and his gaze seems very far away. “It won’t be long before her attention returns here, to the rest of Tamoura,” he says at last.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if her ships show up next at our borders,” Raffaele agrees.

“Will the Golden Triad meet us tomorrow?”

“Yes.” Raffaele glances up at the prince. “The Tamouran royals say their army is still weakened from Adelina’s last siege. They want to try negotiating with her again.”

Enzo gingerly moves the fingers of his left hand, then winces. “And what do you think of it?”

“It will be a waste of time.” Raffaele shakes his head. “Adelina turned down their last attempt without a moment’s hesitation. There’s nothing to barter—what can the royals of­fer her that she cannot simply take by force?”

Silence falls over them again, perhaps the only answer to Raffaele’s question. As Raffaele continues to wrap Enzo’s arms in fresh bandages, he tries to ignore the waves outside. The sound of the sea beyond the window. A pair of candles burning bright in the darkness. A knock on the door.

The memory comes unbidden and unrelenting, breaking through the walls Raffaele has put around his heart since Enzo’s death and resurrection. He is no longer tending to the prince’s wounds but standing, waiting, frightened in his bedchamber at the Fortunata Court years ago, looking out at a sea of masked people.

It seemed as if the entire city had turned out for Raffaele’s debut. Noblemen and noblewomen, their robes of Tamouran silks and Kenettran lace, fanned out across the room, their faces all partially hidden behind colorful half masks, their laughter mingling with the sounds of clinking glass and shuffling slip­pers. Other consorts moved amongst them, silent and grace­ful, serving drinks and dishes of iced grapes.

Raffaele stood in the center of the room, a demure youth dressed and groomed to the height of perfection, his hair a curtain of dark satin, his gold-and-white robes flowing, black powder lining the rims of his jewel-toned eyes, staring out at a sea of curious bidders. He remembers how his hands trem­bled, how he’d pressed one against the other to steady them. He had been trained in the types of expressions to allow on his face, a thousand different subtleties of the lips and brows and cheeks and eyes, regardless of whether they reflected his actual emotions. So, in this moment, his expression had been one of serene calm, of shy allure and gentle joy, silent as snow, absent of his fear.

Now and then, the energy seemed to shift in the room. Raffaele turned his head mechanically in its direction, un­sure of what he was sensing. He thought at first that perhaps his mind was playing tricks on him—until he realized that the energy focused on a young stranger gliding between the crowds. Raffaele’s eyes followed him, mesmerized by the power that seemed to travel in his wake.

The bidding started high and spiraled higher. It soared until Raffaele could no longer make out the numbers, the sights and sounds around him beginning to blur. Other consorts whispered to one another in the audience. He had never heard such amounts tossed back and forth at an auction before, and the strangeness of it all made his heart pound faster, his hands shake harder. At this rate, he could never live up to the winner’s payment.

And then, as the bidding began to trickle down to a few—a young manservant hidden in the crowd doubled the highest offer.

Raffaele’s calm expression wavered for the first time as murmurs rippled through the room. The madam called again for an offer to top it, but none did. Raffaele stood in the silence, willing himself to remain still as the manservant won the auction.

That evening, Raffaele lit a few candles with unsteady hands and then sat alone on the edge of his bed. The blan­kets were silken, trimmed with gold thread and lace, and the scent of night lilies lingered in the air. The minutes dragged on. He listened for the sound of footsteps approaching his chambers and repeated to himself lessons that older consorts had given him over the years.

After what seemed like an eternity, he heard the sound he had been waiting for in the hall outside. Moments later, there was a soft knock on the door.

It will be all right, Raffaele whispered, unsure of the truth of these words. He got up and raised his voice. “Come in, please.”

A maid pushed the door open. Behind her, a masked young man walked into his chambers with the grace of a seasoned predator. The door closed behind him, right as he reached up to remove the mask from his face.

Raffaele’s eyes widened in surprise. This was the same stranger he’d noticed in the crowd. He realized, embar­rassed, that the stranger was quite handsome—dark curls of hair tied back into a low tail, long black lashes framing his eyes, scarlet slashes in his irises. He stood tall, and he did not smile. The energy Raffaele had sensed during the bidding now enveloped the stranger in layers. Fire. Flames. Ambition. Raffaele flushed. He knew he should be inviting the stranger to come closer, to sit on the bed. But, in this moment, he couldn’t think.

The young man stepped forward. When he stopped before Raffaele, he folded his hands behind his back and nodded once. Raffaele felt the energy shift again, beckoning at him, and he couldn’t help but return the stranger’s gaze. Raffaele forced himself to give the young man a smile, one he had been trained to give for years.

The stranger spoke first. “You noticed me in the crowd,” he said. “I saw your eyes following me around the room. Why is that?”

“I suppose I was drawn to you,” Raffaele replied, turning his eyes down and letting the heat rise to his cheeks again. “What is your name, sir?”

“Enzo Valenciano.” The stranger’s voice was soft and deep, silk hiding steel.

Raffaele’s eyes shot back up to him. Enzo Valenciano. Was that not the name of the disgraced prince of Kenettra? Only now, in the dim light of the chamber, did Raffaele realize that the boy’s hair glinted with a hint of deep red, so deep it looked black. A marking.

The former crown prince.

“Your Highness?” Raffaele whispered, so startled that he didn’t think to bow again.

The young man nodded. “And I’m afraid I have no inten­tion of fulfilling your debut night.”

The scene evaporates as a knock sounds on the door. Raffaele and Enzo look over at it in unison and Raffaele lets out a long breath, pushing the memory to the back of his mind as he puts down the bandages. “Yes?” he calls out.

“Raffaele?” a timid voice answers. “It’s me.”

He folds his hands into his sleeves. “Come in.”

The door opens, and Violetta steps hesitantly inside. Her eyes first meet Raffaele’s, then dart to where Enzo sits with his elbows leaning against his knees. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she says. “Raffaele, something strange is happening down by the shore. I thought you might want to have a look.”

Raffaele listens with a frown. So, Violetta has sensed something ominous as well. She looks pale tonight, her olive skin ashen, her full lips pulled into a tight line, hair secured behind a Tamouran wrap. She had found the Daggers with her power almost a year ago, all on her own. It’d taken her a week to find the words to tell Raffaele what had happened between her and her sister, then another week still before she begged them through her tears to find a way to help Adelina. Since then, she has stayed at Raffaele’s side, working with him as he tested her alignments and taught her how to con­centrate her ability to sense others’ energy. She was a good student. A fantastic student.

She reminds him so much of Adelina. If he let himself, Raffaele could imagine that he was staring at a younger version of the Queen of the Sealands, before she turned her back. Before she was beyond help. The thought always saddened him. It is my fault, what Adelina has become. My fault that it is too late.

Raffaele nods at Violetta. “I’ll come in a moment. Wait for me outside.”

As Violetta retreats to the hallway, he finishes bandaging Enzo’s arms, then rubs his own neck in exhaustion. Too many nights in a row he’s spent like this, weeks that stretched into months, all trying in vain to repair Enzo’s wounds. But every time they began to heal, they would worsen again. “Try to sleep,” Raffaele tells him.

Enzo doesn’t respond. His face is drawn, pale from the pain. He is both here and not.

How long ago was it that they had first lost him in the arena? Two years? It seems a lifetime ago, eons, since the last time Raffaele had seen his prince truly alive, the fire in him burning bright and scarlet. He does not want to give Enzo more reason to suffer right now, to let him know how much his presence—half in the living realm, half in the Under­world—hurts those who love him. Instead, Raffaele walks to the door and quietly lets himself out.

The night is warm, a prelude to Sunland summers, and the heat from the day still lingers in the corridors. Raffaele and Violetta walk in silence under the lanterns, passing through the light and the shadows. At each door, he can sense the energy of every one of his Daggers staying inside the apartments. Michel, who after Gemma’s death has locked him­self away for days at a time, losing himself in his paintings. Lucent, whose chamber has a ripple of disturbance in it. Raffaele can sense that she is still awake, perhaps gaz­ing out of her bedchamber window down at the shores. Lucent’s bones have continued to hollow, and now she aches constantly, a development that has made her bitter and short-tempered. Maeve had stayed at first, begging Lucent to return to Beldain with her, even tried bribing and com­manding her—but Lucent had refused. She would remain with the Daggers and fight alongside them until her dying breath. After a while, Maeve was forced to lead her soldiers home. But the Beldish queen’s letters still arrive weekly, ask­ing about Lucent’s health, sometimes sending along herbs and medicines. Nothing has helped. Raffaele knows it will never help, for Lucent’s illness is caused by something deep within her own energy.

The last chamber once belonged to Leo, the bald boy whom Raffaele had recently recruited to the Daggers, who had wielded the power to poison. Now the chamber sits empty. Leo died a month earlier. The doctor told Raffaele that it was because of a lingering lung infection. But Raffaele wonders about another possible reason—because Leo’s body had turned on itself, poisoning him from within.

What weakness will soon manifest in him?

“I heard about Adelina’s latest conquest,” Violetta says when they finally reach the stairway leading out of the palace.

Raffaele only nods.

Violetta glances at him furtively. “Do you think … ?”

How hard she tries. Raffaele can feel his heart reaching out to her, wishing to comfort her, but all he can do is take her hand and soothe her temporarily with a tug of her heart­strings. He shakes his head.

“But—I hear she is offering generous payments to the cit­izens of Dumor,” Violetta replies. “She’s been more generous than she could be. Perhaps if we could only find a way to—”

“She is beyond help,” Raffaele says softly. An answer he has given many times. He is not certain that he believes it, not entirely, but he cannot bear to raise Violetta’s hopes only to see them crushed. “I’m sorry. We need to concentrate on defending Tamoura against Adelina’s next move. We must make a stand somewhere.”

Violetta looks back toward the shoreline and nods. “Of course,” she says, as if convincing herself.

She is not like the others. She aligns with gems, of course— with fear, empathy, and joy—but she has no markings to speak of. Her ability to take away others’ powers makes him uneasy. And yet, Raffaele cannot help feeling a bond with her, a comfort in knowing that she, too, can feel the world around her.

None of the three moons nor any stars are visible tonight; only clouds blanket the sky. Raffaele offers Violetta his arm as they pick their way carefully down the stony path. A hint of charge lingers in the warm winds, prickling his skin. As they make their way around the edge of the estate, the shore comes into view, a line of white foam crashing into black space.

Now he senses what had troubled Violetta. Right along the shore where the sand turns cold and wet, the feeling is incredibly strong, as if all the strings in the world were pulled tight. The waves spray him with flecks of salt water. The night is so dark that they cannot make out any other de­tails around them. Large, looming masses of rock lie nearby, nothing more than black silhouettes. Raffaele stares at them, feeling a sense of dread. There is a pungent scent in the air.

Something is wrong.

“There is death here,” Violetta whispers, her hand quiver­ing against Raffaele’s arm. When he looks at her, he notices that her eyes seem haunted, the same look she has whenever she talks about Adelina.

Raffaele scans the horizon. Yes, something is very wrong, an unnatural energy permeating the air. There is so much of it, he cannot tell where it is coming from. His eyes settle on a dark patch far in the distance. He stares at it for a while.

A series of lightning streaks breaks through the sky, carv­ing trails from the clouds to the sea. Violetta flinches, waiting for the thunderclap to follow, but there is none, and the si­lence raises the hairs on the back of Raffaele’s neck. Finally, after an eternity, a low rumble shakes the ground. His eyes travel down to the waves crashing along the shore, then stop again on the black silhouettes of rock.

The lightning flashes again. This time, the glow lights up the shore for a brief moment. Raffaele steps backward, tak­ing in the sight.

The black silhouettes are not rocks at all. They are baliras, at least a dozen of them, beached and dead.

Violetta’s hands fly to her mouth. For a moment, all Raffaele can do is stay where he is. Many sailors told sto­ries about where baliras went when they died—some said they would go far out into the open ocean, where they would swim lower and lower until they sank to the depths of the Underworld. Others said they would leap out of the water and fly higher and higher, until they were swallowed up by the clouds. The occasional rib bone washed ashore, bleached white. But never had he seen a dead balira in the flesh before. Certainly not like this.

“Don’t come closer,” Raffaele whispers to Violetta. The smell in the air grows more pungent as he draws near, now unmistakably the smell of rotting flesh. As he reaches the first balira, he extends a hand out toward it. He hesitates, then places his fingers gently against its body.

The beast twitches once. This one is just an infant, and it is not dead yet.

Raffaele’s throat tightens, and tears fill his eyes. Something terrible killed these creatures. He can still feel the poisonous energy coursing through its veins, can sense its weakness as it takes another low, rasping gasp of air.

“Raffaele,” Violetta calls out. When he looks over his shoul­der, he sees her wading into the waves as they break against the beach. The hem of her dress is soaked, and she is quaking like a leaf. Get out of there, Raffaele wants to warn her.

“This feels like Adelina’s energy,” Violetta finally says.

Raffaele takes a hesitant step toward the ocean, then an­other. He walks forward until his slippers sink into wet sand. He sucks his breath in sharply.

The water is cold in a way that he has never felt before, cold like death. A thousand threads of energy tug at his feet as the water recedes, as if each one were barbed with tiny hooks, seeking a living being. It sends his skin crawling in the same way a rotting fruit filled with maggots would. The ocean is full of poison, deep and dark and vile. Beneath it churns a layer of energy that is furious and frightening, something he had only once felt in Adelina. He thinks of Enzo’s strange distraction tonight, the faraway look in his half-alive eyes. The way he seemed drawn to the ocean. Raffaele remembers the storm that raged on the night when they’d brought Enzo back from the depths of the sea, where the edge of the living world ended and the world of the dead began.

Beside him, Violetta remains frozen in place as the water sways against her legs.

Raffaele takes a few more steps into the ocean, until the waves come up to his waist. The cold water numbs him. He looks up again to where the silent lightning storm rages, and tears begin to spill down his cheeks.

Indeed, this feels like Adelina’s energy. Like fear and fury. It is energy from another realm, threads from beneath the sur­face, an immortal place never meant to be disturbed. Raffaele trembles.

Something is poisoning the world.