Fable for the End of the World
The Last of Us meets The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in this stand-alone dystopian romance about survival, sacrifice, and love that risks everything.
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
Ava Reid writes the kind of fantasy that feels like folklore rediscovered, as if her stories have been whispered through centuries before finding their way to the page. Her novels, steeped in myth, faith, and the weight of identity, blur the line between the magical and the political, the personal and the historical. With her blend of dark beauty and emotional precision, she has become one of the most distinctive contemporary voices in literary fantasy.
Born in Manhattan and raised across the river in Hoboken, Reid studied political science at Barnard College, focusing on religion and ethnonationalism. That academic path shaped the moral and cultural tensions running through her fiction. Her debut, The Wolf and the Woodsman, draws on Hungarian history and Jewish folklore, exploring nationalism, belonging, and faith through the lens of myth. It established her as a writer unafraid to confront brutality or tenderness, often in the same breath.
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