Isabelle Taylor

A local bookshop employee falls hard for her polar opposite--who just happens to be an orc--in the second installment of Isabelle Taylor's Claw Haven series, perfect for fans of Legends & Lattes and Ruby Dixon In Claw Haven, Alaska, monsters are real--but fated mates? Bookseller Vi Harper doesn't believe, and it's up to one smitten orc to prove otherwise in this sweet and spicy romance. Vi Harper is good at many things. Fixing problems for everyone in Claw Haven, for one. Keeping Sweethelm Bookstore running smoothly, for another. Above all, Vi is great at pretending she's got her life figured out. The truth is, she's a hot mess inside--especially when cocky, gorgeous orc Nick Wicker goads her in his infuriating way. Nick has found his mate. That's the good news. The bad: he's already blown it. Every time Nick speaks to soft-spoken, overworked bookseller Vi, she seems to hate him even more. What's a lovestruck orc to do but stress-bake and look for some way to redeem himself? Even it means joining the book club. Then a batch of apology brownies sparks one passionate night together and suddenly, sensible Vi is doing something completely out of character: offering her one-time enemy a friends-with-benefits arrangement. It's more than Nick dreamed. Phenomenal. And it won't be enough. Not until he's found a way to show her that sometimes, fate gets it exactly right...

Weary Skullstalker, Vale, is given a rest from caring for his void when he is summoned to the mortal realm and presented with an offering: a strange, soft mortal woman.He wants nothing to do with mortals, but it has been centuries since he last had an assistant. So he accepts their offering and spirits the mortal back to his increasingly needy void.It is an immediate disaster. Not only does his void mysteriously start to rot, but his new mortal gets sprayed by a magical pollen. A pollen that awakens her deepest desires...-Meek Ivy Silverpetal has been given one duty: secretly weaken the Skullstalker void so her people can march inside and bind the Skullstalker to fight for them.Ivy isn't expecting to get struck down by lust pollen. Vale insists it connects her to her deepest desires, but that isn't all: it also connects her to the void she just poisoned. The void that Vale once loved so much that it loved him right back.With the pollen in her heart and a Skullstalker's void in her head, it's impossible to do anything but fall for Vale, who gets weaker with each day. Soon she'll have to make a decision: stand with him, or let her people claim him?GIVEN is a high-heat monster romance with more steamy magic; a sentient home, and a HEA. Perfect for fans of Opal Reyne and Katee Robert. It is Book 3 of the Skullstalker Brides series but can be read as a standalone.

The campus has a deep-rooted prestige as a place of teaching, learning and nurturing. Conjuring images of cloistered quadrangles, of sunny lawns, of wood-panelled libraries, it is a word viscerally charged with centuries of scholarly tradition. And yet it is also a place of cutting-edge science, vibrancy and energy. It is this dual nature, this concurrent adherence to tradition and innovation, which renders the physical environment of the university such a redolent, enduring and dynamic realm. However, it also means that the twenty-first-century campus is a highly challenging and exacting landscape to design and manage successfully.Today, the scale of the pressures and the rate of change facing higher education institutions are greater than ever. Squeezed public spending, growing societal expectations and the broadening education ambitions of developing nations are set against a backdrop of rapid technological progress and changing pedagogies. What are the repercussions for the physical realities of university planning and architecture? And how are university campuses adapting to contend with these pressures?University Trends: Contemporary Campus Design introduces the most significant, widespread, and thought-provoking trends that are currently shaping the planning and architecture of higher education institutions across the world. Within this completely revised third edition, Part One identifies current patterns such as student hubs, large-scale expansions and buildings for innovation and interdisciplinary research. Part Two profiles these through recent, well-illustrated, global case studies. This is the essential guide to current and future trends in campus design.

The environment of a university – what we term a campus – is a place with special resonance. They have long been the setting for some of history’s most exciting experiments in the design of the built environment. Christopher Wren at Cambridge, Le Corbusier at Harvard, and Norman Foster at the Free University Berlin: the calibre of practitioners who have shaped the physical realm of academia is superlative. Pioneering architecture and innovative planning make for vivid assertions of academic excellence, while the physical estate of a university can shape the learning experiences and lasting outlook of its community of students, faculty and staff. However, the mounting list of pressures – economic, social, pedagogical, technological – currently facing higher education institutions is rendering it increasingly challenging to perpetuate the rich legacy of campus design. In this strained context, it is more important than ever that effective use is made of these environments and that future development is guided in a manner that will answer to posterity. This book is the definitive compendium of the prestigious sphere of campus design, envisaged as a tool to help institutional leaders and designers to engage their campus’s full potential by revealing the narratives of the world’s most successful, time-honoured and memorable university estates. It charts the worldwide evolution of university design from the Middle Ages to the present day, uncovering the key episodes and themes that have conditioned the field, and through a series of case studies profiles universally-acclaimed campuses that, through their planning, architecture and landscaping, have made original, influential and striking contributions to the field. By understanding this history, present and future generations can distil important lessons for the future.The second edition includes revised text, many new images, and new case studies of the Central University of Venezuela and Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.