Gifted & Talented

Told with Blake’s signature wit and driven by a cast of morally gray characters you will hate to love and love to hate, Gifted & Talented is equal parts black comedy, sharp indictment of privilege and power, and soaring, vicious drama. Addictively entertaining, this is Blake at the height of her abilitiesIncisive, unsparing, and utterly brilliant. Gifted & Talented is a remarkable character study meditating on the consequences of dynasty and power. Olivie Blake’s storytelling has risen to empyrean heightsThis book is half mystery, half puzzle and wholly a delightCompelling, entertaining and addictive. The Atlas Six is academic Darwinism: survival of the smartest with a healthy dose of magicCoolly horrific, brilliantly brainy and utterly compellingSign me up for anything she writesSuccession meets magic in Gifted & Talented – an epic, never-before-published standalone novel from internationally bestselling sensation Olivie Blake. Perfect for fans of Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six and Yellowface by R. F. Kuang.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake is the story of three siblings who, upon the death of their father, are forced to reckon with their long-festering rivalries, dangerous abilities and the crushing weight of all their unrealized adolescent potential.
Where there’s a will, there’s a war.Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne.

Or at least, so they like to think.

Meredith, textbook accomplished eldest daughter and the head of her own groundbreaking biotech company, has recently cured mental illness. You're welcome! If only her father's fortune wasn't her last hope for keeping her journalist ex-boyfriend from exposing what she really is: a total fraud.

Arthur, second-youngest congressman in history, fights the good fight every day of his life. And yet, his wife might be leaving him, and he's losing his re-election campaign. But his dead father’s approval in the form of a seat on the Wrenfare throne might just turn his sinking ship around.

Eilidh, once the world's most famous ballerina, has spent the last five years as a run-of-the-mill marketing executive at her father’s company after a life-altering injury put an end to her prodigious career. She might be lacking in accolades compared to her siblings, but if her father left her everything, it would finally validate her worth – by confirming she'd been his favorite all along.

On the pipeline of gifted kid to clinically depressed adult, nobody wins—but which Wren will come out on top?

This is a compulsive contemporary fantasy of family, twisted love and dangerous secrets from a writer at the height of her powers.

Praise for Gifted & Talented

‘Addictively entertaining, this is Blake at the height of her abilities’ – Ava Reid, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of Lady Macbeth

‘Utterly brilliant’ – Chloe Gong, New York Times bestselling author of Immortal Longings

Olivie Blake is the internationally bestselling author of The Atlas Six, Alone With You in the Ether, One For My Enemy and Masters of Death. Writing as Alexene Farol Follmuth, she’s also released the young adult rom-coms My Mechanical Romance and Twelfth Knight. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, goblin prince/toddler and rescue pit bull.