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  • Published: 4 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529948301
  • Imprint: Del Rey
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $50.00
Categories:

Fable For the End of the World





The Last of Us meets The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes in this stand-alone dystopian romance about survival, sacrifice, and love that risks everything.

The epic standalone dystopian romance from the Sunday Time bestselling author of A Study in Drowning and Lady Macbeth. Perfect for fans of The Hunger Games and The Last of Us

SURVIVAL
SACRIFICE
A LOVE THAT RISKS EVERYTHING


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‘Stunning . . . Among the dystopian greats.’ Chloe Gong
‘Brilliant and devastating, Fable for the End of the World will arm you with the strongest tools we have: both anger and hope.’ Allison Saft
‘Knife-edged and tender-hearted, I will be thinking of the final line for years to come’ Courtney Gould

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By encouraging massive accumulations of debt, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society.

Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town, barely scraping a living from their taxidermy shop. But their mother has secretly accrued enormous debt – and the only way out is to offer her daughter up to be a sacrifice for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination event: the Lamb’s Gauntlet.

Melinoë is the assassin chosen for this spectacle. The product of years of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she’s a living weapon, famous for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. But she’s also haunted by her failure in the last gauntlet, when she broke down live on screen.

But as Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, each determined to claim victory, they begin to question what they’ve been taught. Could there be more to life than survival? Could they be capable of more than death?

Could they, against all the odds, be falling in love?

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PRAISE FOR AVA REID

'A gargantuan hit . . . Dark and brooding, skillful storytelling and intricate character development breathe new life into literature. Dripping in atmosphere . . . One to order immediately.' Glamour

‘A bewitching read with prose like gold.’ Tasha Suri

‘A knife of a book: blood-stained, sharply beautiful, and necessary . . . I couldn't look away’ Alix E. Harrow

‘I was spellbound from the very first page.’ Freya Marske

  • Published: 4 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529948301
  • Imprint: Del Rey
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $50.00
Categories:

About the author

Ava Reid

Ava Reid was born in Manhattan and raised right across the Hudson River in Hoboken, but currently lives in Palo Alto, where the weather is too sunny and the people are too friendly. She has a degree in political science from Barnard College, focusing on religion and ethnonationalism.

Also by Ava Reid

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Praise for Fable For the End of the World

"Nobody balances sweetness with brutality, tenderness with violence, quite like Ava Reid. This hit all the nostalgic Hunger Games notes while bringing fresh sapphic blood to the dystopian genre - I inhaled it!"

L. K. Steven, author of Silvercloak and Our Infinite Fates

‘Brilliant and devastating, Fable for the End of the World will arm you with the strongest tools we have: both anger and hope.

Allison Saft, New York Times bestselling author of A Dark and Drowning Tide

Knife-edged and tender-hearted, I will be thinking of the final line for years to come.

Courtney Gould, author of The Dead and the Dark

Stunning . . . Among the dystopian greats.

Chloe Gong, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights
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