The work opens with an unnamed narrator listening to the reading of a manuscript written many years ago by a now dead young governess. The governess relates that soon after arriving to work in the house she learns that her predecessor had died under mysterious circumstances. As the tale unfolds the reader has room to doubt the reality of the evil that the governess feels is approaching.

Villette was Charlotte Bronte's last and most autobiographical novel. Loneliness, isolation, repression, emotional pain, unrequited love are strong elements and themes in the story. Lucy travels to work in a girl's boarding school. Despite a host of unfavourable circumstances Lucy is determined to be true to her independent spirit. In the end, Lucy wants the reader to imagine a happy ending. Will you?

A novel about the future that's closer than we think.

Lewis Shiner is a two-time finalist for the Nebula (Frontera, Deserted Cities of the Heart), a finalist for the Philip K. Dick (Frontera), and won the World Fantasy award for Glimpses.

This collection veers into the weird side of the Old West, with punks, communists, crooked sodbusters, and a touch of slide guitar.

Lewis Shiner is a two-time finalist for the Nebula (Frontera, Deserted Cities of the Heart), a finalist for the Philip K. Dick (Frontera), and won the World Fantasy award for Glimpses.

ßehemoth ... is the most gripping and the most thought-out [book that Watts has yet written] ... Like Greg Egan's "Reasons to be Cheerful", Watts is arguing for an entirely different way of understanding and presenting character, one that reconfigures both how personality is constructed and how actions are to be understood. This seems to me a unique and particularly science-fictional contribution ... For all Watts's dark humor, and for all the incidental thrills of his future, ßehemoth caps a series which is one of the two or three most challenging works I've read in the last decade.

- Graham Sleight, The NY Review of Science Fiction