A forbidden power. A hidden city beneath London. A law that says she must be bound or burned.

Clara Ashworth spends her days cleaning other people's antiques. Then she opens her late grandmother's biscuit tin and touches a bronze coin that has been asleep for 173 years.

Every light in Cecil Court explodes. Her hair floats. A fern-shaped scar glows across her palm. And Clara has just woken the one kind of magic London outlawed 359 years ago: Stormcalling, the power to call down lightning.

Beneath the streets lies the Gloam, a lantern-lit hidden city ruled by the Lantern Council and policed by its Wardens, who bind or burn anyone born with the storm. Within days a hound made of smoke and iron is hunting Clara through the Underground, and a soft-spoken, impeccably polite Warden named Silas Vane is offering her tea and a quiet end to her magic.

All she has is an eccentric, ink-stained bookseller who once knew her grandmother, a best friend who happens to be an A&E nurse, and a letter that warns her to trust no one who asks nicely for the coin. Her mother died on Hampstead Heath when Clara was nine, struck by lightning on a cloudless afternoon, and Clara is beginning to suspect it was no accident.

She has days to learn to control a storm before someone else decides what to do with her.

THE FIRST SPARK is a fast-paced, atmospheric urban fantasy set in hidden London, with a secret magical society, forbidden power, family secrets and a friendship that holds when everything else breaks. Book One of The Banned Arbiter Chronicles.

Step into the Gloam. Find out why the Council is so afraid of the lightning.

The First Spark

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