David Gemmell Morningstar Award nominee 2016.
Set in a terrifyingly brutal Rome-like world, An Ember in the Ashes is an epic fantasy debut about an orphan fighting for her family and a soldier fighting for his freedom. It’s a story that’s literally burning to be told.
LAIA is a Scholar living under the iron-fisted rule of the Martial Empire. When her brother is arrested for treason, Laia goes undercover as a slave at the empire’s greatest military academy in exchange for assistance from rebel Scholars who claim that they will help to save her brother from execution.
ELIAS is the academy’s finest soldier — and secretly, its most unwilling. Elias is considering deserting the military, but before he can, he’s ordered to participate in a ruthless contest to choose the next Martial emperor.
When Laia and Elias’s paths cross at the academy, they find that their destinies are more intertwined than either could have imagined and that their choices will change the future of the empire itself.
Vow your blood and body to the empire.
Keep your heart for yourself.
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Sabaa Tahir
Sabaa Tahir was born in London but grew up in California’s Mojave Desert at an 18-room motel. During a summer internship at The Washington Post, she wrote an Outlook piece on arranged marriage from her perspective as a South Asian. Little did she know that this would result in an offer of a reality TV show on MTV, a dozen marriage proposals, and one phone call that turned out to be from her future husband. After graduating from UCLA, Sabaa accepted a full-time position as an editor on the foreign desk at The Post. Three summers later, in 2007, she came up with the concept for An Ember in the Ashes. Sabaa currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and children. An Ember in the Ashes is her first book.
