From the author of the New York Times bestseller Wilder Girls comes a new twisty thriller about a girl whose past has always been a mystery--until she decides to return to her mother's hometown . . . where history has a tendency to repeat itself. Ever since Margot was born, it's been just her and her mother. No answers to Margot's questions about what came before. No history to hold on to. No relative to speak of. Just the two of them, stuck in their run-down apartment, struggling to get along. But that's not enough for Margot. She wants family. She wants a past. And she just found the key she needs to get it: A photograph, pointing her to a town called Phalene. Pointing her home. Only, when Margot gets there, it's not what she bargained for. Margot's mother left for a reason. But was it to hide her past? Or was it to protect Margot from what's still there? The only thing Margot knows for sure is there's poison in their family tree, and their roots are dug so deeply into Phalene that now that she's there, she might never escape. Praise for Wilder Girls: 4 STARRED REVIEWS! "Fresh and horrible and beautiful....readers will be consumed and altered by Wilder Girls."-NPR "This thrilling saga...is sure to be one of the season's most talked-about books, in any genre."--EW "The perfect kind of story for our current era."--Hypable "Your new favorite book."--Cosmopolitan.com

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! "Celebrates the resilience of girls and the earthshaking power of their friendships. An eerie, unforgettable triumph." --Claire Legrand, New York Times bestselling author of Furyborn "Wilder Girls is so sharp and packs so much emotion in such wise ways. I'm convinced we're about to witness the emergence of a major new literary star." --Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation A feminist Lord of the Flies about three best friends living in quarantine at their island boarding school, and the lengths they go to uncover the truth of their confinement when one disappears. This fresh, new debut is a mind-bending novel unlike anything you've read before. It's been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty's life out from under her. It started slow. First the teachers died one by one. Then it began to infect the students, turning their bodies strange and foreign. Now, cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves on their island home, the girls don't dare wander outside the school's fence, where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure they were promised as the Tox seeps into everything. But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie beyond the fence. And when she does, Hetty learns that there's more to their story, to their life at Raxter, than she could have ever thought true. 4 STARRED REVIEWS! "Fresh and horrible and beautiful....readers will be consumed and altered by Wilder Girls."-NPR "This thrilling saga...is sure to be one of the season's most talked-about books, in any genre."--EW "The perfect kind of story for our current era." --Hypable "Take Annihilation, add a dash of Contagion, set it at an all-girls' academy, and you'll arrive at Rory Power's occasionally shocking and always gripping Wilder Girls."--Refinery29

Friends Hetty, Byatt, and Reece go to extremes trying to uncover the dark truth about the mysterious disease that has had them quarantined at their boarding school on a Maine island.