Daughter of Smoke & Bone

Karou is an art student in Prague with bright blue hair that grows that colour naturally. Her sketchbooks are crammed with monsters, and nobody can say whether they are invented. She speaks many languages (not all of them human), and keeps vanishing on mysterious errands. Who she really is remains the question that haunts her.

Elsewhere, the world is changing. Winged strangers who have slipped through a slit in the sky are leaving black handprints, burned into doorways around the globe. In a dark, dusty shop, a supply of human teeth has run dangerously low. Karou is about to be drawn into an otherworldly war that has been fought long before she knew of it.

The turning point comes in an alley in Marrakesh, where one of the strangers, a beautiful and haunted figure named Akiva, fixes his fire-coloured eyes on her. What follows is a star-crossed love with roots in a violent past, along with blood, secrets coming to light and a danger to Karou herself.

This is epic fantasy and the first book of a trilogy. It moves between the ordinary life of a student in a European city and a darker, stranger conflict, with romance at its centre and a mood that shifts from mystery to brutality.