Eloia Born

Lois Lowry's The Giver meets Carve the Mark by Veronica Roth

Long-listed for the 2017 Exeter Novel Prize

Two planets with a shared destiny.

Four communities bound in disability.

Two blind teens struggling to find a way to love each other.

Dex and Leanora live in two worlds that intersect: the world of seeing and the world of the blind. Only Leanora is able to travel between them. She has had to keep her limited eyesight a secret from the boy she loves most in the world. When tragedy strikes, she must choose between a comfortable life and surviving outside her blind community.

Leanora and Dex are kicked out of their community and must trek across Eloia in search of her mother while attempting to survive in the harsh wilderness. Her beloved mother, long believed to be dead, has left traces of herself in every community they encounter. Leanora discovers that an alien race her parents belonged to have blinded, deafened and muted Eloia’s major communities.

Each step across the desert and through the treacherous rainforest brings her further away from Dex and closer to a new friendship that could threaten everything she has ever believed about herself, her family and her planet. She must decide if survival is more important than love and if she is strong enough to face the truth that waits for her on the other side of the planet.

Eloia Born is the first in a two book series.