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Fogberry Press

Pub date May 27, 2025

ISBN 978-1069434715

Price $27.99 (USD) Hardcover, $20.05 Paperback,$7.16 Kindle edition

Gateley’s latest is a sprawling, emotionally charged, and fiercely intelligent contemporary fantasy that draws readers into a world where magic is both weapon and wound. After escaping a Wraith facility that left her altered and haunted, Phoebe Ashburn wants only to tear the dark magic out of her before it destroys what’s left. But the only one who might help her is Dr. Ronan Gallagher, the disgraced Druid whom she wants to avoid at any cost. With Wraiths closing in and ancient forces waking, Phoebe must risk an uneasy alliance with the man . What holds them together isn’t trust—it’s desperation, and the faint hope that what’s broken might still be remade. 

Gateley drops readers straight into a brutal magical world, one where power systems are deeply political and memory is inseparable from magic. Rather than offering easy redemption or romance as refuge, the novel charts a quiet, uneasy connection between two people shaped by damage and driven by necessity.  Phoebe is all edges: volatile, damaged, and defiantly uncompromised. Her trauma is not plot decoration; it shapes every breath she takes.  Ronan, on the other hand, is all control and penance, his stability increasingly shaken by the force that is Phoebe.  Rooted in philosophy, ecology, and ethics, the magic system adds texture and thematic weight. Brutal, nuanced, and profoundly moving, this is a fantasy that doesn’t flinch. It offers no easy answers, but it offers something rarer: truth, agency, and the long, hard road to healing. 

An emotionally searing and fiercely intelligent novel.

***