The captivating first novel in The Convergence Saga by Cadwell Turnbull, the award-winning author of The Lesson

An Indie Next Pick

A LibraryReads Pick

Named A Most Anticipated Book by Bustle, Buzzfeed, Forbes, GoodReads, Marie Claire, The Millions, and Tor.com

Profound and unsettling in the best way...Sharp, insightful social commentary wrapped up in a tale of the uncanny. -Rebecca Roanhorse, New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author

Turnbull delves into the complexities of injustice and identity in this powerhouse contemporary fantasy...Fantasy fans won't want to miss this. -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother has been shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it.

As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, seeking safety through visibility, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence. A professor follows a missing friend's trail of bread crumbs to a mysterious secret society. And a young boy with unique abilities seeks refuge in a pro-monster organization with secrets of its own. Meanwhile, more people start disappearing, suicides and hate crimes increase, and protests erupt globally, both for and against the monsters.

At the center is a mystery no one thinks to ask: Why now? What has frightened the monsters out of the dark?

The world will soon find out.

Turnbull, Cadwell

Cadwell Turnbull is the author of The Lesson. His short fiction has appeared in The Verge, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Asimov's Science Fiction, and several anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019. His first novel, The Lesson, was the winner of the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Award in the debut category. The novel was also short-listed for the VCU Cabell Award and long-listed for the Massachusetts Book Award. Turnbull lives in Raleigh and teaches at North Carolina State University.