By Sarah Raughley

Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster Canada

April 18, 2023

Fiction

Hardcover

ThemesSci-Fi and Fantasy

Age / Grade 12-14 / Grades 7-8 14-18 / Grades 9+

Content Colonialism Death Racism Violence

Iris Marlow can’t die. For years, she was tormented by her missing memories and desperate to learn her real identity. So when the mysterious Adam Temple offered to reveal the truth of who she was in exchange for her joining his team in the Tournament of Freaks, a gruesome magical competition, it was an offer she couldn’t refuse. But the truth would have been better left buried.

Because Adam is a member of the Enlightenment Committee, an elite secret society built upon one fundamental idea: that the apocalypse known as Hiva had destroyed the world before and would do it again, and soon. But what the Committee—and Iris—never guessed is that Hiva is not an event. Hiva is a person—Iris.

Now, no matter how hard Iris fights for a normal life, the newly awakened power inside her keeps drawing her toward the path of global annihilation. Adam, perversely obsessed with Iris, will stop at nothing to force her to unlock her true potential, while a terrifying newcomer with ties to Hiva’s past is on the hunt for Iris.

All Iris wants is the freedom to choose her own future, but the cost might be everything Iris holds dear—including the world itself.