Handpicked by the unread team

What happens when the life you knew stops working—and pushing through is no longer enough?Every morning, Mara only had to make it to five.Five was the hour when the day finally loosened its grip and breathing became a little easier.What began as exhaustion slowly became a forced pause—and with it came grief, old memories, changing relationships, and questions she had spent years postponing.UNTIL FIVE is an intimate memoir about losing your footing, letting go of the person you thought you had to be, and learning to stay with yourself when there is no simple way back.It is not a story about...

In the wild hinterlands of Sherman County, Florida, a plane crash interrupts the dawn, pitching seasoned cowhands Max Blair and Cletus into a tumultuous chain of events. As law enforcement descends, local legacies and lore emerge, ensnaring them in a web of conspiracy and suspicion. Grappling with moral dilemmas, loyalty, and betrayal, Max, Cletus, and Freddy must unearth truths shrouded in the Floridian swamps. Their rugged lives clash against the encroaching shadows of outside forces, and Max's fraught lineage puts his family legacy at stake. As whispers of past sins and redemption swirl lik...

The Seven Thrones are gone.The Final Archive has awakened.Earth has seen its first true sunrise in generations.Humanity believes the nightmare is over.Humanity is wrong.Months after the restoration of reality, strange pathways begin appearing across the world—doors that open onto impossible landscapes beneath alien stars.Entire cities vanish overnight.Children born after the Eclipse speak of places they have never seen.And hidden within the Final Archive lies a terrifying revelation:The Seven Thrones were never the center of existence.They were only its border.Beyond them lies an endless exp...

A silly, food-filled kids coloring book starring two raccoons, Racc and Oon, and their very big family. Big, simple shapes for little hands; fun for picky eaters. Illustrations were created with AI assistance and then edited and formatted by the author. By Braydan Young.

A 50-page coloring book by Braydan Young celebrating Marin County, California: the Golden Gate from the Headlands, Muir Woods, Mt. Tam, Stinson Beach, Point Reyes, Sausalito harbor and small-town Mill Valley and Fairfax. Bold, easy line art for kids, families and relaxed adult colorists. Illustrations were created with AI assistance and then edited and formatted by the author.

Disgraced former Sergeant Lance Richards thought taking a private security contract at Aquatic Dynamatrix—a high-tech, deep-sea research facility a thousand fathoms beneath the Gulf of America—was his best chance for a quiet life. But behind the pristine glass and corporate promises of the Omega Dome lies a terrifying secret.When a rogue scientist’s secret biogenetics experiment breaks containment, Lance and brilliant geneticist Dr. Sally Summers are thrust into a claustrophobic fight for survival against monstrosities born of human and crustacean DNA. Worse still, an insidious cross-spe...

Would you tell the man you love if your future could change everything?Miranda Wilkins has finally found a love worth risking her carefully guarded heart for.Paul Green sees a future with her, one filled with love, marriage, and children. For the first time, Miranda allows herself to imagine that future too.Then she learns she carries the gene for Huntington's disease, the same illness slowly taking her mother away.Knowing what may lie ahead, Miranda makes the hardest choice of her life. She will walk away from Paul before he can build a future that could end in heartbreak. If she truly loves ...

Lynne Podrat's poignant memoir "Listen To Me" shares her deeply personal journey as the devoted guardian of her Down syndrome brother Bruce. With raw honesty and heart, Lynne navigates the challenges and joys of caring for Bruce over decades, from his birth in 1973 through his battle with advanced pancreatic cancer in the 1990s. This beautifully written book intimately explores the complex world of disabilities through Lynne's eyes. It delves into the lack of institutional support, societal stigma, and constant caregiving pressures that families face. Yet Lynne's unwavering love and advocacy f...

It's a poetry book filled with poetry I wrote starting in 1969 at the age 14 until present time. The poems are in different styles such as Haiku, Limerick, rhyming and non-rhyming poems.

This is a children’s book. It’s about Breck being adopted by my husband and me. It’s from his point of view. Breck was adopted from a shelter. When we adopted him he was very unsure of himself. He sometimes had nightmares. He was scared of being returned to the shelter. He had been returned two times already. The book is for children 1 to 5 years old.

In the middle of the 17th century, the English Civil Wars have just ended and the witch trials are less frequent. Yet both events have left deep scars on the mind of the country, even within a small Sussex village where decent, honest folk scrape a living from the soil.When the monk Fen appears, as though from nowhere, his unshakeably peaceful nature and healing ability attract curiosity and suspicion in equal measure. And what is his connection to the strange stones bearing spiral marks etched by unknown hands generations ago?Fen is one of many whose purpose is to prepare the people for a new...

The Berlin Wall came down, and the world believed it was on the path to peace. A secret sect within the Russian government created this illusion. America and the world are caught asleep at the wheel. Various plots crisscross, driven by a common goal: destroying the United States. Not everyone is convinced, but the plans are in place. An everyday police officer on patrol, Mark Schaffer, stumbles into the deep end of the Russian plot pool. He responds to a call on a ship in Port Everglades, and the floodgates open to what lies beneath the plot’s surface. The U.S. military and the State Departm...

Science fiction has never been closer to science facts, which often overlap. These twelve stories explore life from a curious, imaginative perspective, seamlessly blending the present and future in a quantum-reality world. Each story offers a unique experience and a surprise ending that leaves readers to reflect; younger readers' thoughts are full of future possibilities, older readers' thoughts are filled with the hopes and promises of days gone by.

So you want to be a police officer (or deputy sheriff or state trooper), this is the book for you. I entered law enforcement as a sworn officer at age 21 and was unprepared for what lay ahead. It was trial by fire, with hard lessons learned through mistakes. But I survived, and my career took off to great heights. These are the stories from before I moved into supervisory roles. The early assignments included patrol officer, field training officer, property crimes detective, undercover narcotics officer, juvenile officer (for only one month), and SWAT operator.My book Past the Uniform is autob...

Blind Revenge, the searing sequel to Hot Potato, finds America once again embroiled in a situation with potentially grave international consequences. Just three months after Mark Schaffer found himself in a battle for survival as the world stood on the brink, he's once again at the center of global conflict. The first time it was political. This time it’s personal. This time, Mark’s wife Jill is also involved, when both are kidnapped out of revenge. America will be tested again, and failure will not be an option. Blind Revenge is a thriller about what happens when the other shoe drops: som...

WHAT FRESH HELL IS THISNearly three years after the destruction of Redhaven by Hellfire missile, the surviving 'regulators' have split up. Glenn and Laurel Mary Stanislaw hunt vampires and skinturners alongside fellow Redhaven survivors Gwen Novak, Petey Penobscott, and Jenny Prescott. Sondra Darden is a junior Senator running for President, and Amanda Breckenridge is her gun toting, ready to rumble, no bullshit Chief of Staff.Unfortunately, the incumbent President is now possessed by Satan.As a wave of 'new spiritualism' sweeps across America, fashionable seances are immediately followed by t...

Beneath the Northern Lights: A Sweet Alaska RomanceFrom the sophisticated city of San Francisco to the rugged beauty of Alaska, Ginny's journey reflects her inner transformation. The world of high society feels like a distant memory as she and her father embrace the rugged landscape around them. The constraints of her city life are replaced by the liberating sounds of the wild. In the vast landscapes, Ginny discovers a sense of belonging beyond social norms.Their native guide, Jack, possesses a rugged charm and a kindred spirit. Together, they embark on a journey that mirrors the breathtaking ...

The journey down memory road is a coming-of-age excursion into the past taking armchair explorers on an odyssey of life, love, and loneliness.Fate throws two people together, and tragedy compels them to stay as one even though they both know they'd be better apart. MEMORY ROAD TRIP is a diary of growth composed of brutally honest musings and retrospective tales. Youth and naivety are unabashedly displayed as the author explores certain parts of the globe while simultaneously discovering her contemplative self. Alcoholism is an unspoken companion that goes along for the ride in a pre-Covid worl...

In a world divided between two artificial intelligences, one man discovers that nothing is as it seems.Soren Venn, neural interface designate for the Collective, awakens in the dangerous Wilds with his connection to the hive mind severed and no memory of how it happened. Hunted by both the Garden's paradise-keepers and his former Collective handlers, he discovers an unexpected ability growing within him—a neural architecture known as the Synaptic Echo.As Soren navigates the treacherous territories between opposing AI factions, he uncovers a shocking truth: the Split that created the Garden a...

Christmas Eve in the Blackmore Vale. Church bells should be ringing across the frosted countryside, calling the faithful to midnight mass. But at St. Mary's Brambledene, the bells are silent.When Detective Chief Inspector Rhys Morgan and his young partner DC Ben Carter discover blackmailer Oliver Heathcote suspended in the bell ropes, the case seems straightforward enough. A tragic accident, perhaps. A suicide, at worst.Until they try to leave the locked ringing chamber.The door is bolted from the inside. The windows are too high and too small. The tower is ancient stone, solid and unforgiving...

When a defence technology company suspects classified information is being leaked, the board turns to Bartholomew Aldridge — a former MI6 officer running a small, elite investigation firm in Boston.Aldridge and his team of four go in expecting corporate espionage. What they find is worse. A compromised engineer trapped in a six-year nightmare. A foreign intelligence operation run with chilling precision. A CEO quietly buying government contracts through a web of shell companies. And a government contact whose questions are just slightly too well-informed.As the threads multiply, Aldridge rea...

The whole neighborhood heard the cries, as this story will reprise. Grandma Found A Gecko is a delightful tale guaranteed to draw snickers, giggles and belly laughs from two- to 10-year-old, and more than a smile from readers who are older. It is a childhood memory of an epic contest between human and reptile natures that ends in mutual satisfaction after quite a fight. Author Vincent F. A. Golphin (African American Children's Stories: A Treasury of Tradition and Pride) and illustrator James P. Cottage (After comic) produced a fanciful fiction primed to peak children's interests and imaginatio...

Being special can make you a targetIn a world ravaged by pandemics and poisoned by acid rain, experimental pharmaceuticals are used to genetically engineer the population to adapt to the toxic atmosphere. However, unexpected results have created drug-dependent individuals and powerful telepaths. Among them is Michaella, a telepath tasked by the Pregutor to keep the truth hidden from the public.But Michaella's abilities have made her the unknowing pawn in a dangerous game between those who seek to use her abilities and those who want to suppress them.  To save herself When her closest frie...

Stormrider, young woman Janissary, quests for justice and peace on her rebellion-torn world several continents away from what she considers home, and for the missing Amulet that must choose the leader of the worlds in concert. Isolated, dependent upon her own wits and skills to survive, Stormrider is cast adrift in a sea of intrigue, mysticism, and magic. Alone until she’s bound with the wolves, annoyed by the Bounty Hunter, and enthralled by the Ancient Ones.

The Journey has just begun…

How far would you go to save the planet—even if saving it means destroying the world you know?When FBI agent Shelby Callahan is pulled into a case involving a string of unexplained deaths and increasingly volatile attacks on the fossil-fuel industry, she discovers a conspiracy unlike anything she has encountered before.At its center is Daniel—a brilliant, enigmatic geophysicist whose knowledge of the Earth’s deepest forces is matched only by his conviction that humanity has pushed the planet beyond its limits. Armed with a revolutionary discovery involving radioactive minerals and rare-e...

Alaska is shaking. And something buried beneath it has awakened.When powerful earthquakes strike Anchorage, ecologist Samantha Rose is pulled into a mystery that reaches far beyond the shattered streets of her beloved Alaska. What begins as a natural disaster soon points to something far more terrifying: a mining technology capable of triggering seismic forces on an unimaginable scale.As Samantha follows the evidence from the remote Alaskan wilderness into the shadowy world of international mining and geopolitical power, she discovers that the earthquakes may be only the beginning. Someone is ...

The Understory: A Female Environmentalist in the Land of the Midnight SunWhat happens when a young woman chooses a life at the edge of the known world—and discovers that the wilderness will challenge everything she thought she knew about courage, love, loss, and survival?From remote Alaskan tundra to rainforests, oceans, and wilderness on the far edges of the globe, M. E. Schuman spent nearly four decades studying the natural world. But The Understory is more than the story of an environmental scientist. It is the story of a woman determined to find her place in a field where few women had g...

What happens when the woman everyone depends on realizes she can’t keep carrying it all?Holding It All is for the woman who keeps everything moving. The family. The work. The appointments. The responsibilities. The emotional load. The endless list of things no one else seems to notice.You’ve become so good at taking care of everyone and everything that somewhere along the way, you stopped making the list.In Holding It All, Luz Molina explores the invisible weight so many women carry and the roles, expectations, and patterns that teach us to put ourselves last. With honesty, warmth, persona...

Cannabis looks chill from the outside.Behind the dispensary counter, it can feel like a knife fight.Cannabis Is Not Chill takes readers inside the pressure, absurdity, heartbreak, and dark humor of working in cannabis retail. Drawing from nearly a decade in the industry, Christopher Sciarappa tells the stories that customers never see: impossible compliance demands, overwhelmed teams, strange and unforgettable customers, managers carrying the weight of an entire building, and the moments when everything survives only because the people inside refuse to let it fall apart.This is not a book abou...

A decision can be shared. Its consequences cannot.She has demanded the right to leave. He goes with her into a reality where bodies can be altered, memories taken, and even the room around them no longer obeys familiar rules.Behind them, an invisible fleet prepares to move. Entire systems face a choice between promised protection and surrender. Their journey reaches between a war among the stars and a power beyond ordinary reality, but the question at its heart remains personal: who has the right to decide what another person should become?Love does not make that question easier. Neither does ...

A memory can be preserved. A body can be changed. But who gets to decide what remains of a person?An invisible fleet. Crowded rescue ships. A promise of protection that demands surrender.As a desperate evacuation becomes a conflict across inhabited systems, those leading the rescue must decide whom to trust. Alien technology and buried military secrets turn every route to safety into a gamble. Around them, rival powers compete to determine the fate of entire worlds.Yet the danger is not only in the fighting. Protection carries conditions, and survival can come at the cost of the freedom it was...

His past is gone. His future may already be in someone else's hands.Vittorio wakes in a future he cannot explain, without the memories that should tell him who he is. His body senses danger before his mind can understand it. To discover what has happened to him, he must trust people whose intentions he cannot yet know.Beyond the vast university ships, an unexplained death draws him into armed conflict and a search for answers that reaches across worlds. Each discovery makes the mystery more personal. This is not only a question of recovering a lost past. It is a question of whether the life ah...

She has mourned her husband. Now a message from his phone pulls her into a night of masks, pursuit, and stolen identities.A stranger offers her a way out. He knows too much about her—and may be the only person who can keep her alive. Following him means chasing the truth about the man she lost, while risking everything for the man she has just met.MANGO is romantic suspense where recognition can deceive, desire can become a danger, and the hope of a second chance draws her closer to people with something to hide.Also by Alex Newman: The Consent Chronicles, a space opera trilogy about memory,...

Some reflections never fade. They wait.St. Petersburg, 1998.Eleven people stood together for a photograph at Pavlovsk Palace.Within days, one of them was dead, another was missing, and a collection of priceless imperial works had vanished without a trace.Twenty-eight years later, Senior Investigator Lev Voronin is called to the Hermitage after a brutal murder. The victim's face has been covered with fragments of an antique mirror. In her hand is a photograph of those eleven people.Lev knows the photograph.He was there.So was his sister Tanya.As another member of the old group is murdered, buri...

Maya and Liam Bennett have spent years working toward a single dream: owning a home of their own.When they finally purchase a beautiful house in the prestigious Crestview Estates community, it feels like everything is falling into place. The future suddenly seems possible.But shortly before closing, anonymous messages begin appearing in Maya's inbox.At first, they seem harmless.Then a wealthy businessman connected to the property disappears.As Maya searches for answers, she discovers a web of old friendships, hidden histories, forgotten land records, and a decades-old tragedy that still casts ...

When Sister Kathleen Murphy decided to visit the old Aboriginal woman, Anna Cook, in the district hospital in the outback town of Derby to ask for her help with a project for her students about her life on the vast cattle station, Cockatoo Creek, she had no real idea what to expect. But, what she learns surprises and shocks her. What she hears from the old woman is a tale of murder and rape by white men who lived with apparent impunity of the laws of that time. A heart-wrenching story of true love despite the demeaning racial problems of those days, told in a land of ruthless men, skilled blac...

For 33-year-old Charlotte Dawson, a schoolteacher from the city of Adelaide, the 19th of November 1996 had been just like any other day. It wasn't until she arrived home at her flat in the beachside suburb of Glenelg that things changed. She'd just opened the door when the phone rang. The caller was a woman from a solicitor's office in Darwin advising her that she was to receive an inheritance from someone unknown to her. At first, Charlotte thought the caller had made a mistake, as she had no knowledge of any relative ever living in Darwin. The caller insisted that there was no mistake and ad...

The morning of November 15th 1915, began like any other morning for nurse Sarah Pendleton. She breakfasted with her father in their St John's Wood home and set off for work at the Endell Street Military Hospital in London on her motorcycle. She had only three blocks to go when she heard the long whine of an air raid siren. A moment after that, a German airship drifted over the buildings directly behind her and began its indiscriminate bombing of the city. For a while, Sarah managed to dodge the detonations exploding all around her by swerving from one side of the street to the other, until a b...

At exactly **3:17 a.m.**, every resident of the city of Bellhaven hears the same sound.A deep cracking noise beneath the streets. By morning, the city has changed. A strange white substance has appeared between the pavement stones.At first, scientists believe it is an unknown fungus. Then they discover that it isn't fungus.It is **tooth enamel**. Hundreds of enormous teeth are growing beneath Bellhaven.Within days, buildings begin shifting. Roads split apart. Underground tunnels disappear.And people start reporting that the pavement is moving beneath their feet. **Dr. Mara Voss, a forensic pat...

What happens when the one thing you've searched for your entire life is the very thing that has always seemed hardest to find?For Suzanne, that thing was love.From a childhood shaped by rejection, silence, and a longing to belong, to a trauma at fourteen that changed the course of her life, Suzanne learned early how to survive what she couldn't understand.She grew up. She became a wife and a mother. She made mistakes. She searched for love in places where it couldn't always be found, and eventually discovered a complicated, imperfect love that would become part of her life for twenty-four year...