The Wicker King

August is a misfit with a taste for fire. Jack is the golden boy of the varsity rugby team. Their friendship runs deep and goes back years, and Jack once saved August's life.

Now Jack starts seeing hallucinations shaped like an elaborate fantasy kingdom, which seeps in at the edges of the everyday world. Their parents are unreliable, so August decides to handle it as he always has, alone. He treats the visions as real, and he follows when Jack leads them on a quest to fulfil a dark prophecy.

The two boys push away everyone around them as their hold on sanity loosens. The fantasy world seems to suit them exactly, and they sink further into it. In the end, each of them must pick the truth he will live by.

The book is a psychological thriller for young adults, built from short pieces of micro-fiction with a stream-of-consciousness feel and multimedia elements. It deals with mental health and with a codependent bond marked by tension, madness and love. Reading it is unsettling and intense, with the line between real and imagined constantly slipping.