Oswiu, The Second

Everyone in his family could see something was different about Oswiu. No one could see what it would cost.

Fifteen-year-old Oswiu Morrison has always been a little apart from the world - restless, gifted, carrying something in him that even his parents can't name. Between his mother Joyce's careful worry, his father Peter's practical concern, his little sister Eleanor's wide-eyed watching, and the quiet, grounding presence of Andrea - the girl who makes the strangeness in him feel survivable - Oswiu's life is, for a while, ordinary in all the ways that matter.

Then his magic starts waking up. And it doesn't ask permission.

As his abilities grow faster than anyone can explain - and faster than he can control - a woman named Majel finds him exactly when he's most ready to be found. She sees what his family can't, offers what they won't: a name for what he is, a promise of mastery, a sense that he was always meant for more than the ordinary life closing in around him. He gives her his trust completely.

It costs him everything.

An accident during one of their sessions kills his mother. And the woman who caused it doesn't confess - she disappears him. Majel fakes Oswiu's death and spirits him away to what she calls Beasley College, a hidden institution for the magically gifted.

It doesn't exist. It never did. There is no faculty, no other students - only Majel's delusion, and Oswiu, its first and only captive, for more than twenty-five years.

Oswiu, The Second is a literary novel about the ordinary life stolen out from under an extraordinary boy - the family he lost, the love he walked away from, and the decades it took to find his way back to a life that was actually his own. For readers of Piranesi, Uprooted, and The Magicians - stories about power, and what it costs the people who carry it.