From international bestseller Soman Chainani comes a devastatingly powerful political thriller set in America, 5 minutes in the future. A global revolution set into motion by the newly elected seventeen-year-old President of the United States of America turns deadly when the Revolting Youth meet for the first time for their G-8 summit.
YOUNG WORLD
by Soman Chainani
Random House, Spring 2026
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)
As a new election approaches, America is a powder keg, waiting for a match. Then a teenager makes a video.
Benton Young is just trying to impress a girl when he goes online, urging people to write in his name for President. Not because he’s special or skilled. Instead, Benton is a goofy, relatable kid tired of a world where being young means growing up under a cloud of doom. “No one is coming to save us,” he says. “We have to save ourselves, starting with a vote against a broken system.”
To Benton’s shock, the video explodes—and the global party of Revolting Youth is born. Its platform: to turn the future over to those who will inherit it. To bring back the right to be young. And from the seed of a single video, the impossible happens … Benton Young, age 17, is elected President.
One election becomes a movement, and soon eight of the world’s biggest powers are run by teenagers. Teens who are smart, ambitious, capable—but also wild, ruthless, messy, horny, and young. When they meet for the first time at a G-8 summit in Sweden, they have a chance to set the course of history. At play: an unclaimed island in the Arctic with enough treasure to save the world —or destroy it.
On night one, a leader is assassinated in cold blood. And the new American President is the chief suspect. A globetrotting thrill-ride begins, led by our young hero under siege, desperate to prove that the young aren’t condemned to repeat the mistakes of the old. That Revolting Youth can forge a new path, one that will stand the test of time. But to become the hero the world needs, first Benton has to find the real killer-before he’s the next victim himself.
Soman Chainani’s debut series, The School for Good & Evil, has sold more than 4.2 million copies, been translated into 35 languages across six continents, and has been adapted into a major motion picture from Netflix that debuted at #1 in over 80 countries at release. His book of retold fairytales, Beasts & Beauty, also debuted on the New York Times bestseller List, his seventh book in a row to do so, and is slated to be a limited television series from Sony 3000, with Soman writing and executive producing. A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia University’s MFA Film Program, Soman has been nominated for the Waterstone Prize for Children’s Literature, been named to the Out100, and also received the Sun Valley Writer’s Fellowship. In his career, Soman has visited over 800 schools around the world, where he continues to share his secret with students of all ages that reading is the path to a better life.
August Levy and Reed Horowitz have always done everything together. Neighbors born a month apart, they were destined to be best friends, and they’ve been by each other’s sides through childhood scrapes, awkward preteen years, and high school drama, even while they’ve dated other people. It’s ridiculous, really, that their friends think they’re secretly pining for each other—they’re mature. Evolved. They’d never let themselves be that cliché. Now it’s senior year, and there’s one major milestone they’re hoping to hit before they start college: have sex for the first time. Their school spring break trip to Europe provides the perfect opportunity, with no parents, considerable freedom, and the fact that both their crushes will be there. There’s just one tiny snag: August has already lost her virginity, something she’s been keeping from Reed for reasons she can’t quite admit to herself.