Burn The Water 🔥🌊

By Billy Ray.

Burn the Water drops the reader straight into a flooded future where London has been swallowed by the rising oceans and only fragments of the old world remain.

What once was a bustling city is now a skeleton of skyscrapers, rusting metal and waterlogged streets.

Three hundred years after the collapse, two factions, the Crowns and the Rogues, are still locked in a brutal conflict over the last pieces of land left to survive on.

In the middle of this endless war we meet Rafe and Jule, each the fiercest soldier their House has ever produced.

They are weapons shaped by hatred, symbols of pride for their people and sworn enemies who should never cross paths outside of a battlefield. Yet when they do, everything changes.

Their relationship is immediate, intense and completely forbidden. It becomes clear very quickly that loving one another is a death sentence, but neither can walk away. Their story feels raw and desperate, which suits the world they inhabit.

Ray builds a vivid and cinematic setting that feels both futuristic and stripped back by disaster. Technology is a memory, old systems have crumbled and the way people communicate and travel resembles a much earlier era.

This sense of regression adds weight to the warring factions and makes their desperation frighteningly believable. The tension rising from the appearance of mysterious outsiders adds another layer of threat as Rafe and Jule attempt to keep their loved ones alive and their people from destroying each other.

At its heart this is an enemies to lovers story set against a landscape shaped by climate collapse and generations of violence.

The world building is strong and atmospheric, with sharp action scenes and a gritty tone that suits the characters perfectly. Rafe and Jule carry the narrative with a mix of loyalty, exhaustion and a fierce longing for peace that neither quite believes can exist.

Burn the Water is intense, cinematic and driven by powerful emotion. A dark and gripping dystopian book with a romance that refuses to let go.

Thank you to the team at Scholastic UK for sending out the book! The book is out now and available to purchase.

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