The First Spark

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 peoples antiques. Then she opens her late grandmothers 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.