Radiant — Karina Sumner-Smith

Magic, ghosts, and a dystopian future combine in this genre-bending fantasy debut.

In the City, magic guarantees a life free from illness, hunger and hardship -- unless, of course, you have none. Without even a spark of bright magic, Xhea can't buy breakfast, can't open doors, can't even tell the City's systems that she exists. Yet she has a single gift: an ability to see ghosts and control the tethers that bind them to the living world.

Xhea thought she knew everything about ghosts -- that is, until she takes possession of Shai, the ghost of a girl who hasn't died, and finds herself hunted through the Lower City's dangerous streets. Shai's body was stolen, her ghost is running scared, and Xhea finds herself trapped between two powerful entities that will stop at nothing to regain the girl, dead or alive.

But soon even the manhunt for the living ghost is eclipsed by the strange power that Shai's presence brings to life in Xhea: a magic dark and slow, like rising smoke, like seeping oil. A magic whose very touch brings death.