"Western Australia, 1886. After months at sea, a slow boat makes its passage from London to the shores of Bannin Bay. The sea is a shocking blue, and gulls float above battered mangrove jetties. From the deck, young Eliza Brightwell and her family eye their strange new home. Here is an unforgiving land where fortune sits patiently at the bottom of the ocean. A land where pearl shells bloom to the size of soup plates. Where men are coaxed into unthinkable...

Fifteen-year-old Halfdan's skills as an archer and a blacksmith win him a position on the crew of a Viking ship in 845 A.D., but as war breaks out in western Frankia he becomes a scout, searching for the Frankish army--and taking captive a young woman who is preparing to be a nun.

As new groundbreaking research suggests that climate change played a major role in the most extreme catastrophes in the planet's history, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen takes us on a wild ride through the planet's five mass extinctions and, in the process, offers us a glimpse of our increasingly dangerous future. Our world has ended five times: it has been broiled, frozen, poison-gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends...