The Girl Who Was Never Written

Some people are born. Quira was found—abandoned on the scriptorium steps, wrapped in a quire of twenty-four blank leaves, with no birth-line, no parents, and no proof she was ever meant to exist at all.

In Palimpsa, the Twice-Written City, ink is power. Words set down in the true, quick ink don't describe the world—they command it. A single sentence can raise a creature from nothing, hold weevils from the granaries, or strike a person out of the record and the memory of everyone who ever loved them. The cost is paid by the writer, one forgotten letter at a time. Quira copies other people's stories for a living in dead ink that cannot lie because it cannot speak, aching for the one thing she has never had: to be written into the world herself, to be real enough to lose.

Then a forbidden, unfinished manuscript begins writing itself through the copying-hall—advancing in Quira's own crooked, hooked hand, in ink that stays impossibly wet and cold. Line by line it rewrites streets, neighbours, and the listed dead, and no one but Quira remembers what is being erased. The story has waited a hundred years for an author with nothing left to spend. And it has found her.

To stop it, Quira must finish what a vanished master could not, outwit a High Redactor who dreams of rewriting the whole city in his own image, and discover the one true ending that can close the book without unmaking everyone bound inside it. But the ending may cost her the only thing she has ever wanted.

Lyrical, intricate, and haunting, Imara Vale's debut is a love letter to language and the terrible weight of being written down—a fantasy for anyone who has ever wondered whether they truly count.

Open the quire. Find out how it ends—before someone else writes it for you.