First published 2015
Smitha is seventeen, admired across her town, and used to getting what she wants. When a stranger asks for her hand and she turns him down with contempt, he curses her. Frost spreads from her fingertips. The cold works inward until her skin burns with it and nothing she touches survives the chill. Her neighbors drive her out. She retreats into the hills, alone and hunted, where the only company she finds is Death himself, who circles her with patience and pulls her toward his empty world. Smitha refuses to go. She builds a life in the frozen margins, finds work that matters to her, and discovers that wanting to live is its own kind of armor. Then a man enters her story, one she cannot hold without harming, and that gap between them becomes the sharpest pain she carries. The novel turns on a simple question: can warmth survive inside a body the world has written off as lost?
Genres: romance, literary-fiction, fantasy, young-adult, dark-fantasy
Vibes: atmospheric, haunting, introspective, lyrical, melancholic
Tropes: cursed-protagonist, found-family, isolation-to-connection, slow-burn-romance
Setting: town, hills
254 pages · Paperback · 47North
Content warnings: death