Excerpt from Mad Eden by Morgan Thomas, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Nova is a magician, albeit a bad one. They have exceptional magical abilities, but they have no understanding of sameness. Nor do they understand cause and effect. Due to this, they are the only magician in their college who is not allowed to attend the scientific ritual performed daily to keep the dragnos away.

Dragnos are the first magical beings of the world, great winged things who evolved to drive humans mad, as this made them easier to hunt. That no human had been taken by a dragno in recent memory is only thanks to the magicians' adherence to rituals, their insistence on sameness. If a dragno can't differentiate between humans, it can't hunt them.

Nova is different. They walk with an individual gait. They don't adopt appropriate foot placement or body posture or mouth shaping during speech articulation. They can't even catch a ball. It is only due to the magician Markov's absence that they are allowed to attend the ritual on the day in question.

"Don't let me down," says Hans, the only magician who is kind to them.

Nova tries. They rise at the same time as the other magicians, digest the same simple roots, and walk, at the same time and in the same way as the others, into the libby where the ritual will take place. For a moment, they feel it: sameness. Beside the other magicians, they start to say the magical language they've studied for years.

"The fundamental prerequisite for extraction is hypermalleability, which mitigates monitored mechanisms," the magicians say. In the center of the libby is a dragno body, descaled so you can see the muscle and veins, the brain and heart.

It is the first time Nova has seen a dragno. They should look the other magicians in the eyes, but instead they look at the dragno. As they observe it, the dragno starts to sing. The music unravels the magicians' language; Nova nearly fails to say, "Suppressing sustains probabilistically," but catches themselves just in time. "Pleneum splinters a stochastic spectrum," Nova says, and through its music the dragno says, The hidden, then makes a sound Nova can't understand—soulières? schultz?

"Transcriptomic trends," Nova says, and the dragno says, The hidden scale is here.

Excerpted from Mad Eden by Morgan Thomas. Copyright © 2026 by Morgan Thomas. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.