YOUNG ADULT FANTASY · SPECULATIVE FICTION

Stories of courage, magic, choice and consequence.

N C Branwell writes immersive fantasy and speculative fiction about young people facing impossible choices, hidden truths and worlds that ask more of them than they expected.

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BOOKS

Three worlds. Three fights against the rules.

YA QUEST FANTASY

The Weight Compass

In Hallowmere, magic runs on debt—and you can never undo your own mistake.

Wren Ashcombe has spent nineteen years believing her hands do not matter. Then she finds her gifted older sister turning slowly to glass after breaking the one Law no living Warden can undo.

An old story points to the Last Ember, a relic at the edge of the world. With a disgraced apprentice and a hardened salvager as her only allies, Wren crosses a wasteland of walking debts and hunted grief toward a Forge that will demand a price no caster has ever been willing to pay.

A quest fantasy about rescue, the quiet violence of being underestimated, and becoming someone new.

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NEAR-FUTURE THRILLER

The Ledger

Everyone has a number. It decides who gets the hospital bed, who gets housed, and who gets to matter.

Zuri Adeyemi has spent six years watching PALLAS decide who is worth saving in time. When her sister’s failing kidneys are priced out of reach by a score she will never climb, a stranger offers a way around the number.

What follows pulls a paramedic, an architect, an investigator and an underground network into a race to expose a machine that was never broken—it was built to work exactly this way.

A character-driven thriller about institutional cruelty and what it costs to stop being afraid of it alone.

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YA FANTASY

Blood and Bellows

A blacksmith’s apprentice. A wounded gryphon. A royal bloodline that was supposed to be extinct.

Branwen Ashford has spent twelve years making sure nobody looks at her too closely. Then a wounded gryphon crashes into the hills above her village, and her hands heal it with a fire that should not exist.

Swept from her forge to a citadel full of magicians and old power, Branwen must master a strength she never asked for while uncovering the truth about her mother, her bloodline and the kingdom that has spent fifteen years lying.

A fantasy about inheritance, convenient lies and choosing—at real cost—who you become.

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“The rules matter most when someone decides who has to pay for them.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

N C Branwell

N C Branwell writes character-driven fantasy and speculative thrillers concerned with power, inequality, inheritance and the systems people are told they cannot change.

Across imagined kingdoms and near-future cities, the stories centre on people who have been underestimated, categorised or pushed to the margins—and what happens when they stop accepting the role chosen for them.

Stories of courage, magic, choice and consequence.

Three worlds. Three fights against the rules.

The Weight Compass

The Ledger

Blood and Bellows

N C Branwell

New books, release news and occasional notes from the writing desk.