A Hunger of Thorns

1

Nan is very particular about tea.

She orders a personalized blend from an under-­the-­counter botanica on the wrong side of town, and it gets shipped to her in bulk, a large wooden crate filled with vacuum-­sealed packages. Nan decants them one by one into a floral tin with creaking hinges.

Halmoni bought her an electric kettle years ago, but Nan refuses to use it. She fills an ancient cast-­iron kettle with rainwater from the tank outside the back door and lights the gas burner with a match.

Nan doesn t ask if I want tea. The kettle is already on, with curls of steam and faint whistles escaping from the spout. I have made the journey downstairs from my bedroom, now there will be tea. Tea is nonnegotiable.

I push aside five cross-­stitched cushions, Nan s knitting basket, and two cats to make a space on the couch, and sit down. Princess Bari stalks away, offended, her tail twitching, but Gwion Bach clambers into my lap and starts kneading my thighs. His claws sink through the thin layers of my dress and the brand-­new stockings that Halmoni bought me just for today. I imagine the pinprick holes widening and splitting into ladders, and I feel a brief surge of wicked satisfaction. But these stockings are fancy enchanted ones and will not ladder, so I will remain neat and respectable. Put together is how Dr. Slater would put it. Today, I have to be put together, even though I m falling apart.

Nan takes a pinch of tea from the floral tin and leans out the back door to sprinkle it on the doorstep, over the deep engraved marks of overlapping circles and daisy wheels that keep our house free of mischief. She opens another tin and fishes out a handful of thrupenny biscuits, which she plunks onto a china plate without ceremony.

Orright, Miss Maude? she says to me.

Gwion Bach finally deems my lap sufficiently molded to his requirements and settles himself into a furry brown puddle. I rub behind his ears, and he purrs.

She reaches up

Lili Wilkinson

"Full of vivid and poetic prose, this girl-power fantasy will win fans among lovers of magic in the natural world."  School Library Journal

"Wilkinson offers plenty of tantalizing surprises in this tangled volume featuring complicated familial connections, dangerous secrets, and even more perilous obsessions."   Publishers Weekly

A spellbinding, leisurely paced tale with a captivating, imperfect heroine Kirkus Reviews

"Readers who prefer stories with rich characters will effortlessly lose themselves in this ambitious, lyrical fairy tale." Booklist

"Gritty, visceral and unflinching, A Hunger of Thorns is a lush coming-of-age story that upends narrative expectations about witches and fairy tales." BookPage

The luscious depth of the worldbuilding and the effortless skill with which it is conveyed make me utterly jealous. Read this, and wonder where Lili Wilkinson has been all your life. Amie Kaufman, New York Times bestselling coauthor of the Aurora Cycle

A Hunger of Thorns is visceral fantasy; it tells its story not just in the bodies of young people but through all creation around them. This novel teems with life-forms real and imagined winged, scaled, furred, barked and leaved, macro and micro, solid and almost intangible. It zooms in with scientific precision, then pivots to passionate invention. Maude s quest will take you to deep, dark, festering places and bring you soaring back out into the light. This novel resonates strongly with our uncertain times. It will give courage and hope to readers seeking their true selves and a way forward into a richer, realer life. Margo Lanagan, author of Printz Honor Book Tender Morsels

In this wonderful book, Wilkinson creates a whole new kind of magic enchantments woven from family, from living things, and from the marrow of Story itself. Unlike anything else.   Scott Westerfeld, author of the Uglies and