New York Times bestselling author Andrew Joseph White's explosive gothic horror, set in an alternate Victorian England where mediums control the dead. Mors vincit omnia. Death conquers all. London, 1883. The veil between the living and the dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums command spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society. And sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he’ll be married by the end of the year. It doesn’t matter that he’s needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing; and that the veil and its ghosts have rejected Silas, leaving him unable to do spirit-work at all. When a failed attempt to escape his fate leaves a man mortally wounded, Silas’ parents send him to Braxton’s Finishing School for Elegant Young Ladies. The school is cold and brutal, the instructors are merciless, and the students sequestered within have no chance of leaving unless they surrender their bodies to the creation of more Speaker sons. Here, Silas is trapped—until he meets Daphne, the closeted trans girl he has been betrothed to. Daphne sees cracks in the Speakers’ story, and, like Silas, has a taste for vengeance. Together, they vow to drag the Speakers into the light and force them to face the lies behind the system they’ve created. That is, if Braxton’s and the Speakers don’t break them first.
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