Olivie Blake

Discover The Atlas Paradox, the electric dark academia sequel to viral sensation The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake – a No.1 Sunday Times bestseller. Inside the Alexandrian Society alliances will be tested, hearts will be broken and all must pick a side. Six magicians were offered the opportunity of a lifetime. Five are now members of the Society. And two paths lie before them. In this thrilling next instalment, the secret society of Alexandrians is unmasked. Its newest recruits realize the institute is capable of raw, world-changing power. It’s also headed by a man with plans to change life as we know it – and these are already under way. But the cost of this knowledge is as high as the price of power, and each initiate must choose which faction to follow. Yet as events gather momentum and dangers multiply, which of their alliances will hold? Can friendships hold true and are enemies quite what they seem? Reader reviews for The Atlas Paradox: ‘Olivie Blake has done it again’ ‘More of everything I loved from the first book’ ‘I was completely shocked. NOW I NEED BOOK 3’

The Atlas Paradox

Mahi Patel

Olympus was empty and so was hell. The devils were all here, in this house. 

Emilia Vulliamy

Alina

The loss of their sixth member was, by then, no longer fresh. It was, however, still noticeable. Like an old war wound that pained them only when it rained, the missing hum of Libby Rhodes and her anxiety seemed to haunt the standing space between the five initiates, unspoken—existing only in the promises they had made to one another. From somewhere beneath the floorboards, her absence pulsed.

Nico wasn’t the only one left unbalanced. They were all slightly different without Libby Rhodes. Without them realizing it, she had established herself as the “but” in their collective conscience, their measure of morality. But what if this happens, but what if something goes wrong, but what if someone is hurt. The effects of her displacement from their anatomy as a group seemed imperceptibly compounding, like an infection that went undiagnosed. They could go on without her, of course, but the loss would surely prove significant given enough time. Slow internal bleeding, the toxification of a kidney. A tiny puncture somewhere in the constitution of an otherwise healthy lung.

For them the purpose seemed to be here, I have perfectly encapsulated your beauty, but after several versions of noticing some divergent detail or another, one thing Parisa had come to learn was that other people’s view of her said far more about them than it ever did about her.

What was that they said, about people who had lived through extraordinary loss missing the ordinary? The little things, the trifling reassurances that made up their primary language. The culture of their own tiny nation, which had recently withstood some bombs.

Do you know how many times society has already collapsed? It will happen again and rebuild itself, but how will it rebuild? Think about it. The old gods are dead, no one believes in them, so what is left now but a broken, faithless world?

“I’m nobody’s victim,” Reina said flatly.

“Neither were they. Not in that sense.” Callum folded his arms over his chest. “But if you think about it, nobody asks for any of this. What they’re born into. We just get what we get, and that’s a tragedy in itself. Everybody’s got one.”

He missed Libby Rhodes the way he would miss having electricity. Or his left hand. He did not know how to function without her.

Again, no names. Which meant Parisa probably already knew that Nico missed Gideon like he would miss his conscience, or his ability to slip a punch. He did not know who he was when Gideon was gone.

What did he think love was—pain? Was that all anyone believed love to be? That if it didn’t hurt, if no one pined, then it was as if it did not exist and had never existed—a tree brought down in the forest with no one to hear it fall?

"In the end, the pitfall and the providence of knowing Nico de Varona was that he could not be readily forgotten, not easily parted from. Missing him was like missing a severed limb. Never quite complete and never whole, though on occasion the vestigial aches proved helpfully informative."

The Atlas Paradox quotes

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