New Releases by Anne Rice

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Rice allows [her vampires] to do what they do best: wreak havoc and evoke terror. All while impeccably dressed.” —The Washington Post The vampire world is in crisis ... Old vampires, roused from deep slumber in the earth, are doing the bidding of a Voice commanding that they indiscriminately burn their kin in cities across the globe, from Paris to Mumbai, Hong Kong to San Francisco. Left with little time to spare, a host of familiar characters including Louis de Pointe du Lac, Armand, and even the vampire Lestat, must embark on a journey to discover who—or what—is driving this mysterious being.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Vintage Anne Rice—a lushly written, gothic … metaphysical tale. This time, with werewolves.” —The Wall Street Journal When Reuben Golding, a young reporter on assignment, arrives at a secluded mansion on a bluff high above the Pacific, it’s at the behest of the home’s enigmatic female owner. She quickly seduces him, but their idyllic night is shattered by violence when the man is inexplicably attacked—bitten—by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness. It will set in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation that will propel Reuben into a mysterious new world and raise profound questions. Why has he been given the wolf gift? What is its true nature—good or evil? And are there others out there like him?

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of the Vampire Chronicles, the third installation of her spellbinding Mayfair Chronicles—the inspiration for the hit television series! “[Taltos] is a curious amalgam of gothic, glamour fiction, alternate history, and high soap opera.”—The Washington Post Book World When Ashlar learns that another Taltos has been seen, he is suddenly propelled into the haunting world of the Mayfair family, the New Orleans dynasty of witches forever besieged by ghosts, spirits, and their own dizzying powers. For Ashlar knows this powerful clan is intimately linked to the heritage of the Taltos. In a swirling universe filled with death and life, corruption and innocence, this mesmerizing novel takes us on a wondrous journey back through the centuries to a civilization half-human, of wholly mysterious origin, at odds with mortality and immortality, justice and guilt. It is an enchanted, hypnotic world that could only come from the imagination of Anne Rice. . . . The magic of the Mayfairs continues: THE WITCHING HOUR • LASHER • TALTOS

In a new and major novel, the creator of fantastic universes o vampires and witches takes us now into the world of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the destruction of Solomon''s Temple, to tell the story of Azriel, Servant of the Bones. He is ghost, genii, demon, angel--pure spirit made visible. He pours his heart out to us as he journeys from an ancient Babylon of royal plottings and religious upheavals to Europe of the Black Death and on to the modern world. There he finds himself, amidst the towers of Manhattan, in confrontation with his own human origins and the dark forces that have sought to condemn him to a life of evil and destruction.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR TV SHOW, FROM THE NETWORK BEHIND THE WALKING DEAD '[W]hen I found Rice's work I absolutely loved how she took that genre and (...) made [it] feel so contemporary and relevant' Sarah Pinborough, bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes '[Rice wrote] in the great tradition of the gothic' Ramsey Campbell, bestselling author of The Hungry Moon The 8th novel in Anne Rice's internationally bestselling Vampire Chronicles Here is the glorious and sinister life of Marius: patrician by birth, scholar by choice and one of the oldest vampires of them all. From his genesis in ancient Rome, to his present day we follow the story of this aristocratic and powerful killer. His is a tale that spans the breadth of time. When the Visigoths sack his city, Marius is there; with the resurgence of the glory of Rome, he is there, still searching for his lost love Pandora. So prevalent is Marius that it is he who gives the dark gift to the illustrious vampire Armand. Intertwined with the stories of a magnificent Pantheon of the undead this account of Marius is the most wondrous and mind-blowing of them all.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The second novel in Anne Rice's hugely ambitious, moving, and masterful portrayal of the life of Christ, following Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. It’s a winter of no rain, endless dust, and talk of trouble in Judea. All who know and love Jesus find themselves waiting for some sign of the path he will eventually take. After his baptism, he is at last ready to confront his destiny. At the wedding at Cana, he takes water and transforms it into red wine. Thus, he’s recognized as the anointed one and called by God the Father to begin a ministry that will transform an unsuspecting world.

An intimate memoir of Anne Rice's Catholic girlhood, her unmaking as a devout believer, and her return to the Church - what she calls a decision of the heart. Moving from her New Orleans childhood in the 1940s and '50s, with all its religious devotions, through how she slowly lost her belief in God, Called Out of Darkness also recounts Anne's years in radical Berkeley, where she wrote Interview with the Vampire (a lament for her lost faith) and where she came to admire the principles of secular humanists. She writes about loss and alienation (her mother's drinking, the deaths of her young daughter and later, her husband); about the birth of her son, Christopher; and about how, after 38 years as an atheist, she once again came to believe in Christ. Anne Rice makes a spiritual confession that is a celebration: a brilliant, subtle exploration of the journey through life that allows one to answer the call out of darkness.

The archetypal vampire myth is refreshed for a modern audience in this narrative of an 18th-century Louisiana plantation owner named Louis Pointe du Lac and the charismatic and powerful vampire Lestat who chooses Louis to be his fledgling. In Louis's first-person confession to a skeptical boy, this novel transforms the vampire from a hideous predator into a highly sympathetic, seductive, and human figure. The life of immortal Lestat, raised with a deep Catholic faith, provides a background for the novel's philosophical discussions of the nature of evil, the reality of death, and the limits of human perception. La mitologi a del vampiro es reinventado para lectores del siglo 20 en esta historia de Louis Pointe du Lac, el duen o de una plantacio n en el Louisiana del siglo 18, y el vampiro poderoso y dina mico Lestat quien adopta a Louis como disci pulo. El voz de Louis narra la novela, y este punto de vista trasforma el vampiro de un monstruo a una figura simpa tica, seductiva, y humana. La vida de inmortal Lestat, quien tiene profunda fe cato lica, provee una arena para discursos filoso ficos de la natura del malo, la realidad de la muerte, y las limitaciones de la percepcio n humana.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of The Vampire Chronicles, two seductive and mesmerizing novels linked by two distinct creatures of the night In Pandora, fledgling vampire David Talbot chronicles the history of Pandora, a two-thousand-year-old vampire. In Vittorio, the Vampire, set in fifteenth-century Renaissance Florence, Vittorio finds his world shattered when his entire family is destroyed in an act of unholy violence and embarks on a desperate quest for revenge.

Fiery, fierce, and erotic, Blood Canticle marks the triumphant culmination of Anne Rice’s bestselling Vampire Chronicles, as Lestat tells his astounding tale of the pleasures and tortures that lie between death’s shadow and immortality. . . . Surrounded by its brooding swampscape, Blackwood Farm is alive with the comings and goings of the bewitched and the bewitching. Among them is the ageless vampire Lestat, vainglorious enough to believe that he can become a saint, weak enough to fall impossibly in love. Gripped by his unspeakable desire for the mortal Rowan Mayfair and taking the not so innocent, new-to-the-blood Mona Mayfair under his wing, Lestat braves the wrath of paterfamilias Julien Mayfair and ventures to a private island off the coast of Haiti. There, Saint Lestat will get his chance to slay his dragon. For Mona and the Mayfairs share an explosive, secret blood bond to another deathless species: a five-thousand-year-old race of Taltos, strangers held in the throes of evil itself.

In her new novel, perennial bestseller Anne Rice fuses her two uniquely seductive strains of narrative -- her Vampire legend and her lore of the Mayfair witches -- to give us a world of classic deep-south luxury and ancestral secrets. Welcome to Blackwood Farm: soaring white columns, spacious drawing rooms, bright, sun-drenched gardens, and a dark strip of the dense Sugar Devil Swamp. This is the world of Quinn Blackwood, a brilliant young man haunted since birth by a mysterious doppelgänger, “Goblin,” a spirit from a dream world that Quinn can’t escape and that prevents him from belonging anywhere. When Quinn is made a Vampire, losing all that is rightfully his and gaining an unwanted immortality, his doppelgänger becomes even more vampiric and terrifying than Quinn himself. As the novel moves backwards and forwards in time, from Quinn’s boyhood on Blackwood Farm to present day New Orleans, from ancient Athens to 19th-century Naples, Quinn seeks out the legendary Vampire Lestat in the hope of freeing himself from the spectre that draws him inexorably back to Sugar Devil Swamp and the explosive secrets it holds. A story of youth and promise, of loss and the search for love, of secrets and destiny, Blackwood Farm is Anne Rice at her mesmerizing best.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Vampire Chronicles continue as the great vampire Marius returns. The golden-haired Marius, true Child of the Millennia, once mentor to The Vampire Lestat, always and forever the conscientious foe of the Evil Doer, reveals in his own intense yet inti- mate voice the secrets of his two-thousand-year existence. Once a proud Senator in Imperial Rome, kidnapped and made a “blood god” by the Druids, Marius becomes the embittered protector of Akasha and Enkil, Queen and King of the vampires, in whom the core of the supernatural race resides. We follow him through his heartbreaking abandonment of the vampire Pandora. Through him we see the fall of pagan Rome to the Emperor Constantine and the horrific sack of the Eternal City itself at the hands of the Visigoths. Bravely, Marius seeks a new civilization in the midst of glittering Constantinople, only to meet with the blood drinker Eudoxia. We see him ultimately returning to his beloved Italy, where after the horrors of the Black Death, he is restored by the beauty of the Renaissance. We see him become a painter living dangerously yet happily among mortals, giving his heart to the great Botticelli, to the bewitching courtesan Bianca, and to the mysterious young apprentice Armand. Moving from Rome to Florence, Venice, and Dresden, and to the English castle of the secret scholarly order of the Talamasca, the novel reaches its dramatic finale in our own time, deep in the jungle where Marius, having told his life story, seeks some measure of justice from the oldest vampires in the world.

From Anne Rice, author of Beauty''s Kingdom, the third book in the erotic Sleeping Beauty series Before E.L. James'' Fifty Shades of Grey and Sylvia Day''s Bared to You,, there was Anne Rice’s provocative take on the timeless fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty. “ In the final volume of Anne Rice''s deliciously tantalizing erotic trilogy, Beauty''s adventures on the dark side of sexuality make her the bound captive of an Eastern Sultan and a prisoner in the exotic confines of the harem. As this voluptuous adult fairy tale moves toward conclusion, all Beauty''s encounters with the myriad variations of sexual fantasy are presented in a sensuous, rich prose that intensifies this exquisite rendition of Love''s secret world, and makes the Beauty series and incomparable study of erotica. In it, Anne Rice, writing as A.N. Roquelaure, makes the forbidden side of passion a doorway into the hidden regions of the psyche and the heart.

With Pandora, Anne Rice began a magnificent new series of vampire novels. Now, in the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, she tells the mesmerizing story of Vittorio, a vampire in the Italian Age of Gold. Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures--a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power. In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the vampire Ursula, the most beautiful of his supernatural enemies. As he sets out in pursuit of vengeance, entering the nightmarish Court of the Ruby Grail, increasingly more enchanted (and confused) by his love for the mysterious Ursula, he finds himself facing demonic adversaries, war and political intrigue. Against a backdrop of the wonders--both sacred and profane--and the beauty and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.

Five-hundred-year-old Armand recounts the story of his life to David Talbot, a fledgling vampire.

"STARTLING . . . FIENDISH . . . MEMNOCH''S TALE IS COMPELLING." --New York Daily News "Like Interview with the Vampire, Memnoch has a half-maddened, fever-pitch intensity. . . . Narrated by Rice''s most cherished character, the vampire Lestat, Memnoch tells a tale as old as Scripture''s legends and as modern as today''s religious strife." --Rolling Stone "SENSUAL . . . BOLD, FAST-PACED." --USA Today "Rice has penned an ambitious close to this long-running series. . . . Fans will no doubt devour this." --The Washington Post Book World "MEMNOCH THE DEVIL OFFERS PASSAGES OF POETIC BRILLIANCE." --Playboy "[MEMNOCH] is one of Rice''s most intriguing and sympathetic characters to date. . . . Rice ups the ante, taking Lestat where few writers have ventured: into heaven and hell itself. She carries it off in top form." --The Seattle Times

After 6,000 years of horrifying stillness, Akash, mother of all vampires and Queen of the Damned, has risen from her sleep to let loose the powers of the night. But her monstrous plan for ruling the worlds of the living and the undead must be stopped before she destroys mankind, and it falls to the evil vampire Lestat to fight her all-encompassing evil - for it is he who challenged her power by waking her from sleep.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of the Vampire Chronicles, the first installation of her spellbinding Mayfair Chronicles—the inspiration for the hit television series! “Extraordinary . . . Anne Rice offers more than just a story; she creates myth.”—The Washington Post Book World Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him. As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, an intricate tale of evil unfolds. Moving through time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the Louis XIV’s France, and from the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, The Witching Hour is a luminous, deeply enchanting novel. The magic of the Mayfairs continues: THE WITCHING HOUR • LASHER • TALTOS

In another feat of hypnotic storytelling, Anne Rice continues the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles that began with the now classic Interview with the Vampire and continued with The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. Lestat speaks. Vampire-hero, enchanter, seducer of mortals. For centuries he has been a courted prince in the dark and flourishing universe of the living dead. Lestat is alone. And suddenly all his vampire rationale--everything he has come to believe and feel safe with--is called into question. In his overwhelming need to destroy his doubts and his loneliness, Lestat embarks on the most dangerous enterprise he has undertaken in all the danger-haunted years of his long existence. The Tale of the Body Thief is told with the unique--and mesmerizing--passion, power, color, and invention that distinguish the novels of Anne Rice. "From the Hardcover edition."

In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time

Lestat recounts the story of how he became a vampire in eighteenth-century France

Analyse : Roman fantastique.

Returning to the hypnotic world she so brilliantly created in Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice demonstrates once again her power to enthrall. “Brilliant ... its undead characters are utterly alive.”—The New York Times Book Review With the same richness of drama, atmosphere and incident, she tells the fantastic story of the vampire Lestat, whom we first perceived as the seductive devil-vampire of Interview with the Vampire and whom we now follow through the ages as he searches for the origin and meaning of his own dark immortality. And who, more and more, engages our sympathy until he stands revealed as a questing romantic, a vampire-hero with his own strange and passionate courage and morality. As the novel opens, Lestat, having risen from the earth after a fifty-five years'' sleep, and infatuated with the modern world, presents himself in all his vampire brilliance as a rock star, a superstar, a seducer of millions. And, in this blaze of adulation, daring to break the vampire oath of silence, he determines to tell his story, to rouse the generations of the living dead from their slumbers and to penetrate the riddle of his own existence. As he speaks we are plunged back into eighteenth-century France, into the castle where we meet the young Lestat: child of impoverished aristocrats, heroic hunter of wolves, at odds with his tyrannical father, running away to join a traveling troupe of actors. We see him in the licentious Paris of the day, first apprentice at a boulevard theater, then its most celebrated actor, idolized, adored by many and--night after night--watched by one . . . until, in a sleep filled with dreams of the wolves he killed as a boy, he is shocked awake by a dark figure and suddenly, horribly, eternally joined to the unholy brotherhood. We follow Lestat as he searches for others like him--in churches and brothels, in gambling houses, huts and palaces--sometimes joined by the vampire-angel Gabrielle, who is bound to him both by blood and by passion; sometimes traveling with his adored Nicolas, the violinist whose music and beauty are equally transcendent. We follow Lestat as he travels from the snowcapped mountains of the Auvergne and the primeval forest of ancient Gaul to Sicily, Istanbul, Venice and Cairo, searching for his origins, sometimes finding clues to the birth of the vampire race, knowing always that the central truth eludes him. But all the while, throughout his travels, through many lands and many times, Lestat has made enemies among his brethren--vampires who are in terror of his questions, who fear he will disturb the uneasy balance in which they exist with the mortal world, and who suspect in him a desire to rule. And when, in the caves below a craggy Greek island, in a sanctuary whose walls are covered with gold-flecked murals, the very first of the living dead awake, the truth at the heart of his quest is at last revealed. Ancient forces held immobile through the ages are irreversibly set in motion, and as the novel rushes to its stunning climax, Lestat''s vampire foes converge in pursuit of him on the demonic freeways of the twentieth century.

The delicious and erotically charged sequel to The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, from the author of Beauty's Kingdom. This sequel to The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, the first of Anne Rice's (writing as A.N. Roquelaure) elegantly written volumes of erotica, continues her explicit, teasing exploration of the psychology of human desire. Now Beauty, having indulged in a secret and forbidden infatuation with the rebellious slave Prince Tristan, is sent away from the Satyricon-like world of the Castle. Sold at auction, she will soon experience the tantalizing punishments of "the village," as her education in love, cruelty, dominance, submission, and tenderness is turned over to the brazenly handsome Captain of the Guard. And once again Rice's fabulous tale of pleasure and pain dares to explore the most primal and well-hidden desires of the human heart. Preceding the visceral eroticism of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey and Sylvia Day's Bared to You, and even more haunting than her own novel Belinda, this second installment in the Sleeping Beauty series is not to be missed.

Before E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey and Sylvia Day's Bared to You, there was Anne Rice’s New York Times best seller The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty In the traditional folktale of "Sleeping Beauty," the spell cast upon the lovely young princess and everyone in her castle can only be broken by the kiss of a Prince. It is an ancient story, one that originally emerged from and still deeply disturbs the mind's unconscious. In the first book of the series, Anne Rice (author of Beauty's Kingdom), writing as A.N. Roquelaure, retells the Beauty story and probes the unspoken implications of this lush, suggestive tale by exploring its undeniable connection to sexual desire. Here the Prince awakens Beauty, not with a kiss, but with sexual initiation. His reward for ending the hundred years of enchantment is Beauty's complete and total enslavement to him . . . as Anne Rice explores the world of erotic yearning and fantasy in a classic that becomes, with her skillful pen, a compelling experience. Readers of Fifty Shades of Grey will indulge in Rice’s deft storytelling and imaginative eroticism, a sure-to-be classic for years to come. "Articulate, baroque, and fashionably pornographic." —Playboy "Something very special . . . at once so light and yet so haunting." —The Advocate