"A Game of Thrones meets X-Men in this 14th-century fantasy from Marie Lu (the Legend trilogy), in a world where "fear is power." Sixteen-year-old Adelina Amouteru is a malfetto, one whose appearance is "marked" by the blood fever that crippled the country of Kenettra and claimed her mother's life. The blood fever took Adelina's left eye, turned her hair silver, and gave her a power that's remained dormant--until the fateful night her merchant father agrees to trade her to a suitor in exchange for cleared debts. Adelina runs away from home, and once her father catches up with her, she taps into a great hatred within and conjures forth phantoms that quickly cause his death. It was an accident, but the Inquisitors arrest Adelina and sentence her to burn at the stake--a common punishment for malfettos--for the murder of her father. Master Teren Santoro, the 19-year-old Lead Inquisitor of Kenettra, works to cleanse the world of malfettos with ""demon"" abilities. When it comes time to burn Adelina in the central market square, Enzo Valenciano, a malfetto known widely as The Reaper, melts her shackles with his burning touch and releases her. He takes her to Estenzia, the northern port capital, where Enzo introduces Adelina to the world of the Dagger Society--a group of Young Elites with dangerous powers--and their mission to find malfettos like themselves before the Inquisition can. Adelina must pass a series of tests before she can undertake bigger missions with the other six Young Elites who can control their talents, and it's here with the Dagger Society that she discovers her ability to conjure illusions is rooted in darkness. But when Teren Santoro takes her younger sister hostage in exchange for information on the identities, location and plans of the Young Elites, Adelina is compelled to betray them, even if it means leaving the undiscovered malfettos all over the world prey to the Inquisitors, and risking her own death as punishment at the hands of the Elites. In Lu's compelling new novel, the characters are morally complex (the Young Elites are not fully innocent, there are depths to Adelina's darkness and layers to the cross Teren bears)--and no one is safe in the book's final conflict. What at first appears to be romance-lite unfolds in tricky and interesting ways. The many twists, cinematic battles and the overriding epic fantasy will keep readers hooked for book two, which teases to be quite the game-changer. Bring it on."

"I heard 'Novocaine For The Soul' on the radio and bought the album the very next day. And with their second record, I got it expecting more of the same. This was pre-internet, so there wasn't a lot of information about it, but it would appear that he lost his sister and mum, and so he wrote this record about being in hospital and watching people die. It was extremely sad, and for a teenager it was like, ""Holy shit! What is this?!"" Kids are always intrigued by sob stories of one kind or another - Nirvana being a perfect example - but this guy had clearly been through a lot. He writes very short and simple yet very affecting songs, not produced in a twee way, but very cold and using lots of samples. They didn't really sound like a band at all. Again, they were a three-piece, and a very simple band. He had a really cool voice and a story to tell, and that again really made me think about the fact that the band doesn't have to be that thing which I always thought they were: that you played your drums and you play your bass, when actually it can be anything you want. That really influenced the way I write music. I used a lot more technology after I got into that album. I started to integrate my live sounds - my guitar for example - with my laptop, and I started using a lot more sampling, thinking I want to be a lot more like Eels. I think an element of his very black humour has crept into my music. You always get the sense that he is talking about something very grave, but he does so in a slightly distracting way. Take 'Susan's House': it's got this ridiculous, quite clearly silly motif, which sounds like Neighbours - he knows it does! He's talking about his problems at Susan's house as he's walking past all these awful things in the street, like a kid who has been shot and a pregnant teenager, but it's couched in this happy, jaunty, slightly sarcastic world, and that is precisely where I'm at in my own music. Like the song 'Get To Heaven' is all about the same thing, walking past horrors but with a smile on your face, whistling a jaunty tune. I think a lot of influence came from Mr Everett, because of his outlook on life, where you can be in a very dark position but music doesn't have to abide by those rules, it can subvert it."

"I've got no idea what it's about but from what I can tell it's about a monkey that explodes things, a monkey that likes the colour red but doesn't like green apples, so he explodes the apples. I just think it's really cool. I love The White Stripes. I love Jack White. I love Meg White. I love how simple their songs are, and instinctive. It feels like they've just started playing at that moment and they're making it up as they go along, just seeing how and where it goes. Even the lyrics - the ""exploding monkey"" - it feels so random. They let the music go where it wants to go naturally, they don't get bogged down trying to glue together complicated bits of melody. Quite a lot of the process of songwriting is trying to find ways to stick bits together and it becomes mathematical in that way. Sometimes you get swamped and weighed down with two bits of music that you can't find a way of joining. And then I listen to The White Stripes and think ""Ahh! You just play them next to each other, you don't have to join them."" It's like what I said about Pixies, they make me feel like music can be anything and can be as simple and as messy as you want. And as loud as you want! I find it really freeing. A lot of songwriting is getting in the right frame of mind, so it's good to have this music that doesn't make you feel worried about what you're doing and not be overly precious about it. If one bit of music isn't working with another bit you've got, you can just throw it away and write another bit, it actually doesn't take very long and maybe it will be better. Or maybe it will be worse, but whatever! There's something magical about it. I loved the three-colour thing the White Stripes did, the little codes in the lyrics about the number three and the symbolism in the album covers. And the way they pretended to be brother and sister! Or were they? Or weren't they?! They're just so fucking cool. Out of all the bands to come out of the last twenty years I think they're one of the best. I'm also so glad they broke up. I'm so glad they stopped and that Jack White does his other stuff now. They left the things that they did and they didn't change. It was just perfect."