The Dark Light

‘Ten minutes to midnight!’ Jonathan shouts over the sound of the blazing fire. Sparks rise into the sky and mingle with the stars. ‘Only ten minutes!’ Bevins says, falling down on his knees. ‘So it begins.’

Rebekah has lived on the island her whole life, and it’s only now that she’s starting to wonder what she might experience outside her strict religious community. Alex has been sent to the island to escape her dark past, and through her eyes it’s a dark and sinister place. Thrown together by chance, Rebekah and Alex strike up an unlikely friendship and it’s together that they attempt to break free of their worlds and make a world of their own. But when a kiss between the girls is witnessed by an islander there is no escape they can make – the Rapture is coming for them all.

Author Biography

Julia Bell is the author of two novels for YA: Massive and Dirty Work both published in the UK and US and translated into many foreign languages. She is also the co-editor of the bestselling The Creative Writing Coursebook, which she wrote and compiled while teaching at UEA. She is an alumni of the UEA Creative Writing MA and has put her writing on hold for the last ten years in order to work as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, where she runs a successful MA programme. She is the founder and director of the Writers’ Hub website and the annual anthology The Mechanics’ Institute Review.