Howl’s Moving Castle meets Neil Gaiman in this propulsive middle-grade trilogy, set in a world as mesmerizing as it is menacing, following children on a quest to save their father who get embroiled in the sinister agendas of rival sorcerers.
CHILDREN OF THE BLACK GLASS (Book 1)
by Anthony Peckham
Simon & Schuster, Mars 2023
(via Writers House)
In an unkind alternate past, somewhere between the Stone Age and a Metal Age, Tell and his sister Wren live in a small mountain village that makes its living off black glass mines and runs on brutal laws. When their father is blinded in a mining accident, the law dictates he has thirty days to regain his sight and be capable of working at the same level as before or be put to death.
Faced with this dire future, Tell and Wren make the forbidden treacherous journey to the legendary city of Halfway, halfway down the mountain, to trade their father’s haul of the valuable black glass for the medicine to cure him. The city, ruled by five powerful female sorcerers, at first dazzles the siblings. But beneath Halfway’s glittery surface seethes ambition, violence, prejudice, blackmail, and impending chaos.
Without knowing it, Tell and Wren have walked straight into a sorcerers’ coup. Over the next twelve days they must scramble first to save themselves, then their new friends, as allegiances shift and prejudices crack open to show who has true power.
Anthony Peckham is a highly acclaimed screenwriter whose work includes Sherlock Holmes and Clint Eastwood’s Invictus. He is a Writers Guild of America Award winner and an NAACP Image Award nominee. Children of the Black Glass is his novel-writing debut.

Twelve-year-old Nesta lives in the woods with her Grandma. It is a lonely life where the woodland animals are her only friends. When Nesta realises that her Grandma is missing, she finds a silver coin which shows her a vision – Grandma was taken by two men in wolfskins and she must rescue her. A local boy, Kit, arrives to take her to safety, but Nesta longs for an adventure and follows him to the bright and noisy town of Ostrov, where the residents are obsessed with fairytales – stories where the women are helpless and dependent, and are always needing to be saved. As the feisty and determined Nesta embarks on a mission to rescue her Grandma, she discovers that generations of secrets have been kept hidden from her. She realises that she must harness her emerging talents to save the only family she knows, figuring out the story of her heritage in the process…
We were meant to be seductive. We were designed to lure humans in.
All legends are born of truths. And just as much lies. These are mine. Judge me for what you will. But you will hear my story first.
R.R. Virdi
Anora Silby can see the dead and turn spirits into gold coins, two things she would prefer to keep secret as she tries to lead a normal life at her new school. After all, she didn’t change her identity for nothing. Hiding her weirdness is just one of many challenges. By the end of her first day, she’s claimed the soul of a dead girl on campus and lost the coin. Turns out, the coin gives others the ability to steal souls, and when a classmate ends up dead, there’s no mistaking the murder weapon. Navigating the loss of her Poppa, the mistrust of her mother, the attention of gorgeous and enigmatic Shy, and Roundtable, an anonymous student gossip app threatening to expose her, are hard enough. Now she must find the person who stole her coin before more lives are lost, but that means making herself a target for the Order, an organization that governs the dead on Earth―and they want Anora and her powers for themselves.