Steven Crossley

David doesn't know much about life beyond the walls of his room, except what he reads in his books. Mourning the death of his mother and angry at his father for moving on so quickly, David is pulled into a world next to our own and discovers all the stories he's read have come to life. However, these stories are different. Angrier. Darker. As David makes his way through the world to find the king and mysterious Book of Lost Things that will help him...

This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor's life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the story into both an exercise of his technical prowess and a delicately crafted picture of a character...

A Darker Shade of Magic, from #1 New York Times bestselling author V.E. Schwab
Kell is one of the last Antari—magicians with a rare, coveted ability to travel between parallel Londons; Red, Grey, White, and, once upon a time, Black.
Kell was raised in Arnes—Red London—and officially serves the Maresh Empire as an ambassador, traveling between the frequent bloody regime changes in

...

When Mordred learns the identity of his father, he struggles with feelings of hatred, but also fights the fate which determines that he kill the good and gracious king.

In Transylvania during the Middle Ages, Fell, a lone wolf with unusual abilities, learns that his destiny is entwined with that of one human, fifteen-year-old Alina, whose mysterious origins have villagers believing she is a changeling.

I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold'. Charles Marlow's dark intuition here arrives at the culmination of his physical and psychological quest in search of the infamous ivory-trader Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's most famous short story, Heart of Darkness. Ambiguously drawn to the powerful 'voice' of this autocratic...

In 1751 in Scotland, cheated out of his inheritance by a greedy uncle who has him kidnapped and put on a ship to the Carolinas, seventeen-year-old David Balfour escapes to the Highlands with the help of the Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart and there encounters further danger and intrigue as he attempts to clear his name and regain his property.