The book also explores madness which is something I’m always if-y about. Additionally no character is entirely good or evil and watching them grapple with making decisions and exploring their motives for their actions was gripping and made this book hard to put down. Watching the character’s relationships with one another develop and change over the course of the book was interesting and also felt very natural.

In A Golden Fury Cohoe does a wonderful job weaving together history, science, and characters creating a unique story that will enthrall readers.Ĭohoe’s characters are interesting, relatable and complicated and watching their stories intertwine and become entangled speaks to just how messy relationships can be, and how navigating them isn’t always a rewarding experience. Trigger Warning: Mental health (characters dealing with loved ones or themselves becoming ‘Mad’), visual hallucinations, audio hallucinations, self harm. But Thea can only run for so long, and soon she will have to choose: create the Stone and sacrifice her sanity, or let the people she loves die.

With the threat of the French Revolution looming, Thea is sent to Oxford for her safety, to live with the father who doesn’t know she exists.īut in Oxford, there are alchemists after the Stone who don’t believe Thea’s warning about the curse-instead, they’ll stop at nothing to steal Thea’s knowledge of how to create the Stone. While combing through her mother’s notes, Thea learns that there’s a curse on the Stone that causes anyone who tries to make it to lose their sanity. The two of them are close to creating the legendary Philosopher’s Stone-whose properties include immortality and can turn any metal into gold-but just when the promise of the Stone’s riches is in their grasp, Thea’s mother destroys the Stone in a sudden fit of violent madness. Thea Hope longs to be an alchemist out of the shadow of her famous mother.

In her debut novel A Golden Fury, Samantha Cohoe weaves a story of magic and danger, where the streets of Oxford and London come to life, and the curse of the Philosopher’s Stone will haunt you long after the final chapter. Format: Physical Advanced Reader Copy provided by publisher

A Golden Fury by Samantha Cohoe