The Rebel

By: Tim Heath

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Penny Black is seventeen, lives alone, and has not used her gift in four months.

That is the mistake.

She thought that giving it up was the responsible thing to do. What nobody has told her is that the thing inside her does not tolerate being ignored — and that when it is starved, it does not weaken.

It arranges her life instead.

Over one long summer it hands her a drug dealer who calls heroin glucose syrup, a man who books her for the evening and turns out to be her Biology teacher, and a school that decides on the eighth day of term exactly what she is.

And it hands her Joy.

Joy Omolaya has been in a care home for three years. Nobody has visited. Nobody knows she is awake in there — no sight, no sensation, no way to signal, three years alone inside her own head — until a girl walks in with flowers and gives her a voice that only Penny can hear.

For the first time in her life, Penny tells someone everything.

She does not tell anyone else.

Because when she finally finds people who understand what she is, they will have a name for it, an explanation for it, and a set of rules she has already broken. And one of them will know her middle name.

There are only two ways this ends. She has already decided which one.

The Enchanti Generation is a four-book sequence told by two narrators. Only one of them is telling you the truth.

For readers of Naomi Alderman's The Power and Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls.

Reader note: this is adult fiction. Contains heroin addiction, coerced sex work, sexual violence and a detailed depiction of attempted suicide.