An exciting fantasy debut where <Stephanie Garber< meets <Iron Widow.<

Eighteen-year-old mixed race factory workers and best friends Eliza and Jules live hand to mouth on the fringes of Ikarian society, but they don&rsquo;t expect to live long. Finally pushed to the edge when her abusive mother and stepfather put her out onto the streets and desperately wanting more from life, Eliza, a talented thief, hatches a plan to escape the poverty of Coketown.

She sets her sights on the queen&rsquo;s <Fleet of Wonders<&mdash;an elite naval competition&mdash;where the brightest minds in the country are recruited to invent a weapon deadly enough to win another brewing war with Ikaria&rsquo;s neighbor. The winning team will be bestowed with gold, land and power.

Eliza and Jules steal their way onto the Belladonna, the crown vessel of the Queen&rsquo;s fleet. Their crewmates are the best of the best. There&rsquo;s Charlotte whose deadly charm is only outmatched by her lethal way with a sabre. There&rsquo;s Pierre, who is as imperious as he is handsome and will one day inherit the very factory Eliza and Jules escaped; he&rsquo;s also the most powerful smith in a generation with the ability to bend metal to his will. Arthur is a renowned mathematician and Suman is trained in the art of medicine. To Jules&rsquo;s delight, Suman is also a poet.

Together, this unlikely group take to the high seas racing against time to be the first crew to create a new and powerful weapon or die trying. And dying is very much on the table. All the while, Eliza embraces the magic she has kept buried her entire life as she plays a seductive game of will they or won&rsquo;t they with both Pierre and Charlotte. Meanwhile Jules embraces a new lease on life and allows himself to fall in love for the first time.

As the competition heats up, secrets unravel, romances and rivalries change fortunes and bonds break, Eliza and Jules will discover who they are and what they&rsquo;re really made of when war finally comes....

Autorentext

Erin Hànyù Lynch

Klappentext

An exciting fantasy debut where Stephanie Garber meets Iron Widow.

In the slums of the Ikarian Empire, mixed-race best friends Eliza and Jules are barely scraping by. So when they see an opportunity to compete in the Fleet of Wonders, they seize it—even if they’ll have to con their way aboard under false identities.

The Fleet of Wonders will pit the nation’s brightest young minds against each other as they race to invent a weapon—one deadly enough to defend Ikaria in a brewing war. The victors will win life-changing riches . . . if they can fend off their opponents’ cut-throat attacks.

But Eliza and Jules won’t be working alone. They’ll be sailing alongside the darkly alluring heir to a factory empire; an imperious earl’s son; a sweet, bookish medical student; and a lethally magnetic aristocrat with secrets of her own. Tensions are high, and only grow higher as Eliza and Jules each become entangled in romances that put their false identities at risk.

It’s not long before they realize that chasing the gold and glory of the Fleet may mean betraying their parents’ homeland by serving the very empire that conquered it. As the competition heats up, Eliza and Jules find themselves at odds, each faced with painful questions of how far they’re willing to go to win . . . and what—or who—they’re willing to sacrifice.