Upcoming YA Novels
Join Lorcan Pike’s reader community to get first access to ARC reviews, release announcements, and exclusive insights into the worlds behind each young adult novel.
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New Reads Ahead
Lorcan Pike crafts YA adventures that blend heart, humor, and high-stakes longing. Discover returning themes, vivid settings, and characters that linger long after the final page.
There are no alarms in Arcadia. The body wakes when it is time; the mind follows with gratitude. Desire is measured. Dissent is reformed. Peace is engineered to last.
Sixteen-year-old Elara Virelli has always been Arcadia’s ideal daughter: top of her class, Civic Prefect, future Ascension candidate. She believes what she’s been taught—that the old world collapsed under the weight of selfish freedom, and that Arcadia’s Reformation has turned former criminals into grateful Gammas, quiet helpers who “gave up their will so that others might keep theirs.”
Then the cracks start to show.
A MagTram that skips a stop. A Gamma technician who slips a piece of black metal into a panel and buys seven seconds of blindness in the network. A misfiled archive that should never have been visible, naming a vanished Councilor whose words have been erased from every official history.
“We cannot build a society on peace enforced through fear. A coerced servant is not a citizen but a powder keg…”
As Elara digs into early records for her Civic Contribution Project, she finds evidence of “provisional citizens,” Purification Halls, and whole communities that never quite made it into the shining story Arcadia tells about itself. At the same time, the Gamma assigned to her household, Lorne, begins to feel less like a perfect symbol of mercy and more like a man with a past the system has carefully blurred.
Arcadia insists that doubt is a flaw in the self, not the system. Questions are allowed only if they lead back to gratitude.
Elara’s don’t.
With every deleted name and “corrupted” file, with every carefully calibrated wellness session that logs her body as data, she has to decide whether being a model citizen means looking away—or whether true loyalty to the people of Arcadia requires seeing what the Council has spent decades hiding.
If the foundations of their peace are built on softened minds and vanished lives, what does it mean to be one of the girls it was all designed for?
The Forgiving Cage is a tense, character-driven YA dystopian novel about manufactured virtue, memory as a tool of control, and one girl’s slow, dangerous refusal to let other people’s erasure be the price of her perfect life.
Dawn Maddox has a secret that could rewrite human history.
To the students at her new high school, she’s just the quiet girl with a talent for Shakespeare and a mysterious past. They don’t know that she used to be Daniel Shurin—a forty-year-old scientist who traded his life for a teenage body to escape a grief that was consuming him.
Living as Dawn is a performance more demanding than any role on stage. She has to learn the unwritten rules of girlhood, the weight of new friendships, and the terrifying, fizzy thrill of a first crush—all while carrying the memories of a man who lived for forty years without ever truly living.
But as the “Lola” procedure becomes a global flashpoint, Dawn’s double life begins to fracture. The science she created is being used as a weapon, and the “David Byrne” pseudonym she used to protect herself is now a target. In a world obsessed with the “Grass is Greener” promise of a second chance, Dawn is finding out that the hardest part of being sixteen isn’t the science—it’s the soul.
In the end, the only thing more dangerous than the truth is the cost of keeping it hidden.
If you found this, please don’t join. This isn’t a manual, it’s a record of how my family lost their minds. Inside, I’ve documented everything:
- Chapter 1: The recruitment party that nearly leveled the house.
- Chapter 4: My sister’s ‘Modest Fashion’ disaster.
- Chapter 6: The flying harness incident (we don’t talk about it).
- Chapter 9: Why the dog is now a ‘Witness.’
It’s 9 chapters of pure chaos. Read it as a warning.
— Matthew S.w.a.C.
Meet the Stand.with.a.Commission family. They don’t have a product, a Bible, or a clue—but they have plenty of Posture. In this 9-chapter comedic odyssey, follow Gary, Susan, and their six increasingly skeptical children as they navigate the bizarre world of Laudos…
Elias “Glass” Thorne used to be a cop. Now, he’s just a man with a glitchy cybernetic eye and a mounting debt to the kind of people who collect in blood.
When Sarah Vane walks into his office, she isn’t just looking for a private investigator; she’s looking for a miracle. Her husband, Arthur, is dead—the latest victim of a “Maglev Massacre” attributed to a sudden, violent bout of brain-burn. The official report is clean, but Sarah’s story isn’t: Arthur was a “Natural,” a man who never touched a piece of chrome in his life.
A man with no hardware shouldn’t be able to short-circuit.
Armed with nothing but a suspicious charity receipt and a wary tip from his old partner, Elias follows a trail of breadcrumbs from the neon-soaked gutters of the slums to the sterile, ivory towers of Aether-Biotech. Along the way, he’ll have to dodge debt collectors, navigate the shifting loyalties of the street, and rely on a ghost from his past—a street kid who sees the things the city tries to hide.
As the “Chrome Widow’s” secrets unravel, Elias discovers a conspiracy involving black-market wetware that goes deeper than a corporate ledger. In a world where memories can be rewritten and souls can be digitized, Elias is about to learn that some secrets are buried for a reason—and the cost of digging them up might be his last remaining shred of humanity.
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