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release date: 27-February, 2027

Davenport, Iowa, 2065. Forty tons of medicine vanish, and the sick begin to die. The New American Empire blames the powerless, hangs its critics on live feeds, and calls it Freedom Through Unity.

Jax Forge survives by breaking the rules. Tess Fidess survives by enforcing them.

He’s a smuggler running food and medicine to people the NAE has written off. She’s a deputy governor reforming a regime that hangs reformers. They form an unlikely alliance that pulls them into a revolution and grows into a dangerous love affair.

The rebellion is riddled with betrayal, and in a nation where loyalty is enforced by terror, loving someone is the deadliest act of all. Every stolen hour is evidence. Every kiss, a weapon in the wrong hands.

Together they could ignite the uprising the NAE fears most. Fight for freedom and lose each other. Choose each other and lose the fight.

Freedom isn’t found. It’s forged.

After seventeen novels, Seeley James brings a seasoned writer's precision to Iron Spark: love, loyalty, and the choices that tear them apart. The revolution is immense. The heartbreak is personal. The character arcs are epic.

Book One of the Iron Spark trilogy, for fans of Andor and The Hunger Games. Releases February 23, 2027.

 ★★★★★ What Critics are saying

The Empire has perfected the machinery of obedience. Iron Spark asks what happens when the human heart jams the machine.

In an empire that criminalizes compassion, love becomes an act of rebellion. A chilling portrait of tyranny and the extraordinary courage required to defy it.

In Iron Spark, Seeley James puts the dystopian epicenter between Iowa and the rest of us: California is a rumor of freedom and the source of the contraband medicine that keeps his characters alive. James’s seventeen prior novels prove he has studied his craft, and it shows: in the pacing, in the refusal to let anyone win cheaply, and in a love story that doubles as a security breach. Jax Forge and Tess Fidess are the most persuasive pair of revolutionaries in recent fiction. Someone should option this before the sequel arrives. – Dwayne Garner

Seeley James sets his revolution where revolutions are not supposed to start: Davenport, Iowa, a river town where a shipment of medicine has gone missing and the government’s answer to questions is a hanging, broadcast live. Chicago, in James’s 2065, is the posting every secret policeman wants. That detail stings on purpose. Iron Spark is a Midwestern book: unshowy, exact about work and weather, stingy with glory. Its smuggler and its deputy governor fall in love the way Midwesterners do, carefully and too late. The violence, when it comes, is earned. So is the hope, what little James allows. –Julian Wood