From award-winning, bestselling author Wayne Johnston comes a boisterous, sweeping tragicomic saga of faith, loyalty, and family secrets that refuse to stay buriedAt twenty-eight, Vivvy Holloway is nearly the same height as when she was five. Though she hides her face behind a veil, a different colour and fabric for each day of the week, she brandishes an acerbic wit that far outweighs her small stature. Having just spent eight years of the 1930s in a convent failing to become a nun, Vivvy is now returning to Holloway Hall, the largest private dwelling in Newfoundland and the crumbling seat of her formidable family.Vivvy’s sister Freda, a doctor, now rules the estate and its fortune. She is also its sole occupant, save for the five-year-old “special member of the family” known as Ivan, who came home with Freda after her failed marriage in the Congo, where she and her husband were missionaries until tragedy struck. Tasked with caring for the boy...

Kael has three rules for surviving Neutral-Row: never eat the meat on a Tuesday, never make eye contact with the patrols, and never stay somewhere long enough to have something to lose.He breaks all three on the same day.When a Viper raid tears through the market and a gap-toothed boy ends up alone behind rain barrels, Kael does what he always does — puts himself between dangerous people and someone who can't afford to be in their way. It costs him a net over the head, a Cobra arrest, and a cell in the Obsidian Spire.It also costs him Lyra.She's his jailer. Cobra Interrogation Lead. Professional blank where her face should be. A violet birthmark hidden behind her left ear — the same mark the clans call contamination and Kael knows means something else entirely. She has a twelve-year-old brother in a Re-Education camp and a Councilor named Aldric who owns them both.Kael has a grandmother's lullaby with a forgery cipher in the third verse.What starts as a desperate bid to survive becomes something larger than either of them planned: a hidden network two centuries in the making, a device that can undo the Oath of One Blood at its source, and an ancient war that never really ended — only went quiet and waited.The Convict's Refusal is a fast-paced dystopian romantasy about a man who can't stop noticing things he shouldn't, a woman who has been performing loyalty so long she's forgotten what the real thing feels like, and a twelve-year-old boy who survived six months in a Re-Education camp by deciding, with complete deliberateness, not to be diminished by it.The enemies-to-lovers slow burn is real. The world-building has teeth. The lullaby means something.For fans of Fourth Wing, An Ember in the Ashes, and The Cruel Prince.

Can a woman possibly give birth to eight children in just three years?Can an angel possibly lay with an earthly woman?Can a woman possibly marry seven men?What causes the happenings in this world – natural or man-made or God-made?What are the consequences of a wrong choice that seemed so right?What would the world have been like if it was the other choice?Read on to find out how an angel came to earth in the past and took advantage of a woman.