Search Worlds Without End

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.

A big, luscious novel that carries us from nineteenth-century Vienna to present-day New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro as it tells the story of three charismatic figures bound together by their obsession with music.

One is an exquisite young woman who dreams of becoming a great musician.

One is a violinist, the ghost of a Russian aristocrat, who preys upon the woman -- using his musical genious to enchant, command, and manipulate her and draw her into his spectral realms.

The third in this triumvirate - he intervenes to become her ally - is the crank shade of Ludwig von Beethoven.

A fabulous trio. A seductively opulent world. An amalgam of the eerie and the romantic that could only come from Anne Rice at her inimitable best.

Anne Rice, creator of the Vampire Lestat, the Mayfair witches and the amazing worlds they inhabit, now gives us the first in a new series of novels linked together by the fledgling vampire David Talbot, who has set out to become a chronicler of his fellow Undead.

The novel opens in present-day Paris in a crowded café, where David meets Pandora. She is two thousand years old, a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to tell the story of her life.

Pandora begins, reluctantly at first and then with increasing passion, to recount her mesmerizing tale, which takes us through the ages, from Imperial Rome to eighteenth-century France to twentieth-century Paris and New Orleans. She carries us back to her mortal girlhood in the world of Caesar Augustus, a world chronicled by Ovid and Petronius. This is where Pandora meets and falls in love with the handsome, charismatic, lighthearted, still-mortal Marius. This is the Rome she is forced to flee in fear of assassination by conspirators plotting to take over the city. And we follow her to the exotic port of Antioch, where she is destined to be reunited with Marius, now immortal and haunted by his vampire nature, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift as they set out on the fraught and fantastic adventure of their two turbulent centuries together.

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.

Anne Rice, best selling author of The Vampire Chronicles, delves into the mysterious legend of the mummy in this original and poetic tale of romance and horror.

It begins in the early 1900s when archaeologist Lawrence Stratford discovers a perfectly preserved mummy in a tomb in Cairo. Little does he know that the mummy, one Ramses the Great, a.k.a. Ramses the Damned, has consumed an extraordinary potion that makes him immortal; only the powerful rays of the sun are needed to bring him to life. Transported to London, the mummy dispenses with his wrap and takes on a human guise. As Reginald Ramsey, he immediately captures the heart of Stratford's daughter, Julie, who is privy to his unnatural secret but can't resist his stunning good looks. All goes well until Reginald comes across Cleopatra, his long-lost love, under glass in a museum. Unable to bear the sight of this once-glorious Queen now on gruesome display, he decides to bring her back to life...a decision he will live - forever - to regret.

The ancient world collides with the modern one in Anne Rice's richly erotic yet sentimental love story that resonates with the macabre

Ramses the Great, former pharaoh of Egypt, is reawakened by the elixir of life in Edwardian England. Now immortal with his bride-to-be, he is swept up in a fierce and deadly battle of wills and psyches against the once-great Queen Cleopatra. Ramses has reawakened Cleopatra with the same perilous elixir whose unworldly force brings the dead back to life. But as these ancient rulers defy one another in their quest to understand the powers of the strange elixir, they are haunted by a mysterious presence even older and more powerful than they, a figure drawn forth from the mists of history who possesses spectacular magical potions and tonics eight millennia old.

This is a figure who ruled over an ancient kingdom stretching from the once-fertile earth of the Sahara to the far corners of the world, a queen with a supreme knowledge of the deepest origins of the elixir of life. She may be the only one who can make known to Ramses and Cleopatra the key to their immortality--and the secrets of the miraculous, unknowable, endless expanse of the universe.

It's the present day. Toby O'Dare--aka Lucky the Fox--is a contract killer of underground fame on assignment to kill once again. He's a soulless soul, a dead man walking. His nightmarish world of lone and lethal missions is disrupted when a mysterious stranger, a seraph, offers him a chance to save rather than destroy lives. O'Dare, who long ago dreamt of being a priest, seizes his chance. Now he is carried back through the ages to thirteenth-century England, to dark realms where accusations of ritual murder have been made against Jews, where children suddenly die or disappear. In this primitive setting, O'Dare begins his perilous quest for salvation, a journey of danger and flight, loyalty and betrayal, selflessness and love.

Anne Rice's extraordinary new novel summons the world of fifteenth-century Rome: a city of beauty and terror, of art and sin. In this extraordinary setting Toby O'Dare, former government assassin, is called upon by the angel Malchiah, to solve a terrible crime of poisoning and to seek out the truth behind the presence of an earthbound restless spirit - a diabolical dybbuk - that is causing chaos in the city.

Toby is plunged into the luscious world of the Italian Renaissance, sent to charm and calm this troublesome spirit. But he soon discovers himself in the midst of dark plots and surrounded by a darker and more dangerous threat as the veil of ecclesiastical terror closes in around him.

As Toby once again embarks on a powerful journey of atonement, he is reconnected with his own past, with matters light and dark, fierce and tender, with the promise of salvation and with a deeper and richer vision of love.

Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of four centuries of witches--a family given to poetry and incest, murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being called Lasher who haunts the Mayfair women.

Moving in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and the France of Louis XIV, from the coffee plantations of Port-au-Prince to Civil War New Orleans and back to today, Anne Rice has spun a mesmerizing tale that challenges everything we believe in.

At the center: the brilliant an beautiful Rowan Mayfair, queen of the coven, and Lasher, the darkly compelling demon whom she finds irresistible and from whose evil spell and vision she must now flee. She takes with her their terrifying and exquisite child, one of "a brood of children born knowing, able to stand and talk on the first day."

Rowan's attempt to escape Lasher and his pursuit of her and their child are at the heart of this extraordinary saga. It is a novel that moves around the globe, backward and forward through time, and between the human and demonic worlds. Its many voices--of women, of men, of demons and angels, present and past--haunt and enchant us. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us through twilight paths, telling a chillingly hypnotic story of occult and spiritual aspirations and passion.

The Mayfair Witches face an unimaginable new threat: the Taltos - the giant race gifted with preternatural knowledge, who breed in minutes and live for centuries. The race that spawned the monster-innocent Lasher, who gave the witches their power and almost destroyed them. Unknown to the Mayfairs, another Taltos still lives: the legendary Ashla, who has done and suffered so much down the centuries. Now a frantic dance speeds them all from the dawn of history and the Dark Ages to high-tech New York, from sensuous New Orleans to Stonehenge and the Scottish Highlands, towards their ultimate fate.

Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly erotic, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force--a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses.

It is a novel only Anne Rice could write....

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.

Three brilliantly colored narrative threads intertwine as the story unfolds:

- The rock star known as Vampire Lestat, worshipped by millions of spellbound fans, prepares for a concert in San Francisco. Among the audience--pilgrims in a blind swoon of adoration--are hundreds of vampires, creatures who see Lestat as a "greedy fiend risking the secret prosperity of all his kind just to be loved and seen by mortals," fiends themselves who hate Lestat's power and who are determined to destroy him . . .

- The sleep of certain men and women--vampires and mortals scattered around the world--is haunted by a vivid, mysterious dream: of twins with fiery red hair and piercing green eyes who suffer an unspeakable tragedy. It is a dream that slowly, tauntingly reveals its meaning to the dreamers as they make their way toward each other--some to be destroyed on the journey, some to face an even more terrifying fate at journey's end . . .

- Akasha--Queen of the Damned, mother of all vampires, rises after a 6,000 year sleep and puts into motion a heinous plan to "save" mankind from itself and make "all myths of the world real" by elevating herself and her chosen son/lover to the level of the gods: "I am the fulfillment and I shall from this moment be the cause" . . .

These narrative threads wind sinuously across a vast, richly detailed tapestry of the violent, sensual world of vampirism, taking us back 6,000 years to its beginnings. As the stories of the "first brood" of blood drinkers are revealed, we are swept across the ages, from Egypt to South America to the Himalayas to all the shrouded corners of the globe where vampires have left their mark. Vampires are created--mortals succumbing to the sensation of "being enptied, of being devoured, of being nothing." Vampires are destroyed. Dark rituals are performed--the rituals of ancient creatures prowling the modern world. And, finally, we are brought to a moment in the twentieth century when, in an astonishing climax, the fate of the living dead--and perhaps of the living, all the living--will be decided.

Lestat, the vampire-hero, enchanter and seducer of mortals, speaks in the new book in the bestselling Vampire Chronicles that began with Interview with the Vampire and continued with The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. For centuries Lestat has been a courted prince in the dark universe of the living dead. But now he is alone, and everything he has come to believe in is called into question. Soon he will embark on the most dangerous enterprise he has ever undertaken.

In Anne Rice's extraordinary novel, the Vampire Lestat--outsides, canny monster, hero-wanderer--is at last offered the chance to be redeemed.

He is brought into direct confrontation with both God and the Devil, and into the land of Death.

We are in New York. The city is blanketed in snow. Through the whiteness Lestat is searching for Dora, the beautiful and charismatic daughter of a drug lord, the woman who arouses Lestat's tenderness as no mortal ever has.

While torn between his vampire passions and his overwhelming love for Dora, Lestat is confronted by the most dangerous of adversaries he has yet known.

He is snatched from the world itself by the mysterious Memnoch, who claims to be the Devil. He is invited to be a witness at the Creation. He is taken like the ancient prophets into the heavenly realm and is ushered into Purgatory.

He must decide if he can believe in the Devil or in God. And finally, he must decide which, if either, he will serve.

In the first four Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice summoned up for us worlds that are fantastic and distant, making them as resonant, real, and immediate as our own. In this, her most daring and darkest novel, she takes us, with Lestat, into the mythical world that is most important to us--into the realms of our own theology.

In the latest installment of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice summons up dazzling worlds to bring us the story of Armand - eternally young, with the face of a Botticelli angel. Armand, who first appeared in all his dark glory more than twenty years ago in the now-classic Interview with the Vampire, the first of The Vampire Chronicles, the novel that established its author worldwide as a magnificent storyteller and creator of magical realms.

Now, we go with Armand across the centuries to the Kiev Rus of his boyhood - a ruined city under Mongol dominion - and to ancient Constantinople, where Tartar raiders sell him into slavery. And in a magnificent palazzo in the Venice of the Renaissance we see him emotionally and intellectually in thrall to the great vampire Marius, who masquerades among humankind as a mysterious, reclusive painter and who will bestow upon Armand the gift of vampiric blood.

As the novel races to its climax, moving through scenes of luxury and elegance, of ambush, fire, and devil worship to nineteenth-century Paris and today's New Orleans, we see its eternally vulnerable and romantic hero forced to choose between his twilight immortality and the salvation of his immortal soul.

In this mesmerizing new novel, Anne Rice demonstrates once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of myth and magic, as she weaves together two of her most compelling worlds -- those of the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair witches.

Once a proud Senator in Imperial Rome, Marius is kidnapped and forced into that dark realm of blood, where he is made a protector of the Queen and King of the vampires–in whom the core of the supernatural race resides. Through his eyes we see the fall of pagan Rome to the Emperor Constantine, the horrific sack of the Eternal City at the hands of the Visigoths, and the vile aftermath of the Black Death. Ultimately restored by the beauty of the Renaissance, Marius becomes a painter, living dangerously yet happily among mortals, and giving his heart to the great master Botticelli, to the bewitching courtesan Bianca, and to the mysterious young apprentice Armand. But it is in the present day, deep in the jungle, when Marius will meet his fate seeking justice from the oldest vampires in the world. . . .

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.

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.

The vampire world is in crisis - their kind have been proliferating out of control and, thanks to technologies undreamed of in previous centuries, they can communicate as never before. Roused from their earth-bound slumber, ancient ones are in thrall to the Voice: which commands that they burn fledgling vampires in cities from Paris to Mumbai, Hong Kong to Kyoto and San Francisco. Immolations, huge massacres, have commenced all over the world.

Who - or what - is the Voice? What does it desire, and why?

There is only one vampire, only one blood drinker, truly known to the entire world of the Undead. Will the dazzling hero-wanderer, the dangerous rebel-outlaw Lestat heed the call to unite the Children of Darkness as they face this new twilight?

Anne Rice's epic, luxuriant, fiercely ambitious new novel brings together all the worlds and beings of the legendary Vampire Chronicles, from present-day New York and Ancient Egypt to fourth-century Carthage and Renaissance Venice; from Louis de Pointe du Lac; Armand the eternally young; Mekare and Maharet; to Pandora and Flavius; David Talbot, vampire and ultimate fixer from the Secret Talamasca; and Marius, the true child of the Millennia. It also introduces many other seductive supernatural creatures, and heralds significant new blood.

From Anne Rice, conjurer of the beloved best sellers Interview with the Vampire and Prince Lestat, an ambitious and exhilarating new novel of utopian vision and power

"In my dreams, I saw a city fall into the sea. I heard the cries of thousands. I saw flames that outshone the lamps of heaven. And all the world was shaken..." --Anne Rice, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis

At the novel's center: the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, hero, leader, inspirer, irresistible force, irrepressible spirit, battling (and ultimately reconciling with) a strange otherworldly form that has somehow taken possession of Lestat's undead body and soul. This ancient and mysterious power and unearthly spirit of vampire lore has all the force, history, and insidious reach of the unknowable Universe.

It is through this spirit, previously considered benign for thousands of vampire years and throughout the Vampire Chronicles, that we come to be told the hypnotic tale of a great sea power of ancient times; a mysterious heaven on earth situated on a boundless continent--and of how and why, and in what manner and with what far-reaching purpose, this force came to build and rule the great legendary empire of centuries ago that thrived in the Atlantic Ocean.

And as we learn of the mighty, far-reaching powers and perfections of this lost kingdom of Atalantaya, the lost realms of Atlantis, we come to understand its secrets, and how and why the vampire Lestat, indeed all the vampires, must reckon so many millennia later with the terrifying force of this ageless, all-powerful Atalantaya spirit.

From his meticulously restored ancestral chateau high up in the mountains of France, Prince Lestat grapples to instil a new ideology of peace and harmony among the blood-drinking community. Accustomed to welcoming the Undead from far and wide, one night he awakes to news of a ruthless attack by a group of maverick blood-drinkers.

After fleeing to investigate the terror, Lestat learns of several new enemies who despise his rule over the blood-drinking realm, and who are intent on disrupting the harmony he tries so hard to maintain. But is Lestat strong enough to take on such evil alone or will sacrifices have to be made? Will his cry for peace be heard in a world riddled with violence?

An enthralling, spellbinding adventure that sweeps from the snowy French mountains to the verdant wilds of Louisiana, on to the far reaches of the Pacific's untouched islands and back to 18th-century St. Petersburg, Blood Communion will have readers gripped to the very end. It is not just a compelling tale of a troubled leader, but a novel about the power of ambition, as well as a timely reflection on the struggle of individuals to find and defend their place in the world.

The time is the present.

The place, the rugged coast of Northern California. A bluff high above the Pacific. A grand mansion full of beauty and tantalizing history set against a towering redwood forest.

A young reporter on assignment from the San Francisco Observer . . . An older woman welcoming him into her magnificent family home that he has been sent to write about and that she must sell with some urgency... A chance encounter between two unlikely people... An idyllic night--shattered by horrific unimaginable violence, the young man inexplicably attacked--bitten--by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness... A violent episode that sets in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation, as the young man, caught between ecstasy and horror, between embracing who he is evolving into and fearing what he will become, soon experiences the thrill of the wolf gift.

As he resists the paradoxical pleasure and enthrallment of his wolfen savagery and delights in the power and (surprising) capacity for good, he is caught up in a strange and dangerous rescue and is desperately hunted as "the Man Wolf" by authorities, the media, and scientists (evidence of DNA threatens to reveal his dual existence)...

As a new and profound love enfolds him, questions emerge that propel him deeper into his mysterious new world: questions of why and how he has been given this gift; of its true nature and the curious but satisfying pull towards goodness; of the profound realization that there may be others like him who are watching--guardian creatures who have existed throughout time who possess ancient secrets and alchemical knowledge. And throughout it all, the search for salvation for a soul tormented by a new realm of temptations, and the fraught, exhilarating journey, still to come, of being and becoming, fully, both wolf and man.

Anne Rice is back, with more werewolves, gothic mansions and epic battles between good and evil

It is the beginning of December and it is cold and grey outside. In the stately flickering hearths of the grand mansion of Nideck Point, oak fires are burning. The Morphenkinder are busy getting ready for the ancient pagan feast of midwinter. Everyone is invited, including some of their own who do not wish them well...

Reuben Golding, the newest of the Morphenkinder, is struggling with his new existence as a Man Wolf, struggling to learn to control his desires and bloodthirsty urges. His pure, luminous girlfriend Laura seems all set to join him in this new way of life, but Reuben is not at all certain he will love her if she becomes as he is. Beyond the mansion, the forest echoes with howling winds, which carry with them tales of a strange nether world, and of spirits--centuries old--who possess their own fantastical ancient histories and taunt with their dark, magical powers.

As preparations for the feast gather pace, destiny continues to hound Reuben, not least in the form of a strange, tormented ghost who appears at the window, unable to speak. But he is not alone: before the festivities are over, choices must be made--choices which will decide the fate of the Morphenkinder for ever.