H. G. Parry
At a glance
From the author of The Magician’s Daughter comes The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, a mythic, magical tale full of secret scholarship, faerie curses, and the deadliest spells of all—the ones that friends cast on each other.
All they needed to break the world was a door, and someone to open it.
Camford, 1920. Gilded and glittering, England’s secret magical academy is no place for Clover, a commoner with neither connections nor magical blood. She’s there only to find a cure for her brother Matthew, one of the few survivors of a deadly faerie attack on the battlefields of WWI.
When Clover catches the eye of golden boy Alden Lennox-Fontaine and his friends, doors that were previously closed to her are flung wide open, and she soon finds herself enmeshed in the seductive world of the country’s magical aristocrats. But the summer she spends in Alden’s orbit leaves a fateful mark: months of joyous friendship and mutual study come crashing down when experiments go awry, and old secrets are unearthed. The consequences will only be truly understood many years later, when it’s too late…
"By turns wondrous, haunting, and mysterious, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door asks big questions and delivers all the right answers. This book is historical fantasy at its finest."
- Olivia Atwater, author of Half a Soul
"Part historical fantasy, part campus novel, and entirely magical, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is easily my favorite read of this year. Parry has crafted an unputdownable, bittersweet tale about thorny love, belonging, and what it means to truly fix a broken world."
- Allison Saft, New York Times bestselling author of A Far Wilder Magic
"A brilliant story of magic and scholarship and ambition. Of sacrifices made to keep loved ones safe, and a secret world that is wilder and stranger and more complicated than even those living in it know. This is a marvelous, thought-provoking, captivating novel, and I loved it completely."
- Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians
In the end, it was four words that changed the course of our lives and the history of the world. Perhaps it wasn’t really so surprising. They were, after all, the most important words in any language.
“What are you reading?”
At first I didn’t think the words were addressed to me. To begin with, in those days people didn’t speak to me without reason. In the week since I had come to Camford, I could count on one hand the number of conversations I’d had with the other students; if I counted only those unprompted by myself, I was down to one finger. That had been on the first day, when somebody had asked who I was. After that, everyone knew, and there had been no more questions. They all pretended not to understand my accent anyway.
For another thing, I was tucked away in a corner of the library where nobody ever came, in the depths of one of the oldest stack rooms, where the shafts of sunlight were clogged with dust and the air had the sweet, stale smell of old paper. The library was the heart of Camford, a great sprawling structure so labyrinthine it was rumoured to be larger inside than out. Some of the students preferred to steer clear of it entirely, not only for the usual reasons students avoided libraries but because they claimed that if the library took a dislike to you it would swallow you up…
