First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page.
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first.
• Finally… reveal the book!

Happy Friday! I hope you’ve all had a brilliant week so far. Today I have a mega 4 hour drive ahead of me from my holiday with friends in Wales to visit some family near Salisbury. The weathers hot & i am incredibly thankful I have air-con in my car, but it’s still going to one long ass journey, so wish me luck! This weeks book is a Rapunzel inspired YA romance, about a girl who steals souls and the boy whose fate is tied to hers. Having read some of the authors previous books I am SO excited to get to this one!

“I can tell someone when they’re going to die. All I need is a lock of hair and their soul. Just in case.”

Sounds good right? Such an intriguing first line. Ready to find out what it is?

For sixteen years, Selestra Somniatis has been trapped in a castle on the Floating Mountain, preparing to take her mother’s place as King Seryth’s right hand. Tied by blood to steal souls for the immortal King of the Six Isles, the Somniatis Witch foretells the deaths of participants in the Festival of Predictions. To outrun your fate is to save your soul and steal the King’s immortality. But if you die, your soul is forfeit. And though thousands have tried, nobody has ever beaten death.

As a soldier in King Seryth’s army, Nox Laederic is an unlikely candidate for the Festival, but he has no plans to die at the hands of the King or his witches. His plan is more akin to violent revenge: steal the King’s immortality and kill the entirety of his court, starting with Selestra herself.

But when Selestra touches Nox in her very first prediction, she sees her own death alongside his–their fates are unmistakably intertwined, and Selestra is no longer safe in the only home she’s ever known. Nox and Selestra will have to enter a turbulent alliance in order to survive long enough to free the Six Isles from King Seryth’s clutches and escape the new fate that hunts them.