The Last of Us meets The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in this dystopian romance about survival, sacrifice, and love that risks everything.
FABLE FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
by Ava Reid
HarperTeen, March 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society.
Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet.
Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. The product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. She has never failed to assassinate one of her marks.
When Inesa learns that her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, at first she despairs—the Gauntlet is always a bloodbath for the impoverished debtors. But she’s had years of practice surviving in the apocalyptic wastes, and with the help of her hunter brother, she might stand a chance of staying alive.
For Melinoë, this is a game she can’t afford to lose. Despite her reputation for mercilessness, she is haunted by painful flashbacks. After her last Gauntlet, where she broke down on livestream, she desperately needs redemption.
As Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, both girls begin to question everything: Inesa wonders if there’s more to life than survival, while Mel wonders if she’s capable of more than killing.
And both wonder if, against all odds, they might be falling in love.
Ava Reid was born in Manhattan and raised right across the Hudson River in Hoboken but currently lives in Palo Alto. She has a degree in political science from Barnard College, focusing on religion and ethnonationalism.
Organisé par la Royal Society of Literature et l’Institut français du Royaume-Uni à Londres, en collaboration avec le ministère de la Culture en France et le Department for Culture, Media and Sport au Royaume-Uni, l’Ambassade de France au Royaume-Uni et l’Ambassade du Royaume-Uni en France, le prix de l’Entente Littéraire a été remis à Londres mercredi 4 décembre lors d’une cérémonie à la Résidence de France à laquelle ont assisté la reine Camilla et Brigitte Macron.
From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, MOTHER MEDIA tells the story of how our contemporary understanding of what a mother is came to be and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. The book charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the many ingenious attempts to remediate nursemaid and mother via speculative technologies and screen media.