Marbury is another world, a dark world that best friends Jack Whitmore and Conner Kirk have fallen into before. A stranger had given Jack a pair of glasses – it’s through the lenses that the boys get to Marbury. Told through Conner’s point of view, THE KING OF MARBURY asks whether Marbury is only in Jack and Conner’s minds, or if it might actually be real. You decide.

Sixteen-year-old Jack gets drunk and is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is kidnapped. He escapes, narrowly. The only person he tells is his best friend, Conner. When they arrive in London as planned for summer break, a stranger hands Jack a pair of glasses. Through the lenses, he sees another world called Marbury. There is war in Marbury. It is a desolate and murderous place where Jack is responsible for the survival of two younger boys. Conner is there, too. But he’s trying to kill them. Meanwhile, Jack is falling in love with an English girl, and afraid he’s losing his mind. Conner tells Jack it’s going to be okay. But it’s not. Andrew Smith has written his most beautiful and personal novel yet, as he explores the nightmarish outer limits of what trauma can do to our bodies and our minds.

Best friends Jack and Conner can’t stay away from Marbury. It’s partly because of their obsession with this alternate world and the unresolved war that still wages there. But it’s also because forces in Marbury—including the darkest of the dark, who were not revealed in The Marbury Lens—are beckoning the boys back in order to save their friends . . . and themselves.The boys try to destroy the lens that transports them to Marbury. But that dark world is not so easily reckoned with. Reality and fantasy, good and evil—Andrew Smith’s masterpiece closes the loop that began with The Marbury Lens. But is it really closed? Can it ever be?From BooklistStarred Review Things got mighty grim for Jack in The Marbury Lens (2010), but it seems that being abducted by a sexual predator and then sucked through a set of glasses, in and out of the ruined wasteland of Marbury, was just the first circle of hell. Jack decides, along with friends Conner, Ben, and Griffin, to destroy the glasses, but smashing the lens only results in fracturing the boundaries between worlds and shuttling Jack and crew through progressively more tortured realities, where savage creatures hunt down boys and disfigured corpses outpopulate the living. The first book’s emotionally eviscerating gut-punch came mostly from Jack’s tormented wavering between the real world and Marbury. This follow-up becomes almost completely unmoored from reality’s anchor, an experimentally crazy tour through a junk-sick fever dream fueled by Jack’s anguish, guilt, anger, grief, and self-loathing. The drawn-out, hellish trip is told in frantic, convulsive prose that festers around the nauseating horrors Jack witnesses in Marbury and the traumatic psychological wounds he can’t stop prying open. Where it all leads to both surprises and recalibrates what the whole trip has been about. Or not. Smith is hardly afraid to leave things open-ended, unspoken, and all the more memorable for it. With this uncompromising two-book saga, Smith has securely carved out his spot on the darkest fringes of YA lit. Grades 10-12. --Ian Chipman Review“Brilliant and remarkably unsettling.”—Kirkus“Smith has securely carved out his spot on the darkest fringes of YA lit.” —Booklist, starred

She wants nothing to do with him or the holiday frivolities... Lady Olivia Rivenhall has always lived at Belhaven Hall. A year has passed since her husband's unexpected death, and she's been living in limbo wondering when she will have to vacate her home and finally decide what to do with the rest of her life. Just as she is beginning to believe that the new earl will never come to take possession of the manor, Maxwell Drake walks back into her life. After almost dying in a gutter in Venice, Maxwell Drake vows to turn his life around. Learning that he's inherited his estranged cousin's title is exactly the fresh start he needs. Max is looking forward to enjoying Christmas in the English countryside at the estate he's missed, but he's dreading facing his cousin's widow, the only woman he's ever loved. The attraction is stronger than ever, but so are the wounds. As Christmas magic steals through the ancient halls and secrets beckon to be...

Marbury is another world, a dark world that best friends Jack Whitmore and Conner Kirk have fallen into before. A stranger had given Jack a pair of glasses – it's through the lenses that the boys get to Marbury. Told through Conner's point of view, THE KING OF MARBURY asks whether Marbury is only in Jack and Conner's minds, or if it might actually be real. You decide.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.