Margins
Lavender and Hemlock book cover
Lavender and Hemlock
2026
First Published
416
Number of Pages

This cosy, atmospheric Sapphic multiverse fantasy spins a tale of love against all odds and across many worlds, for fans of The Ten Thousand Doors of January and V. E. Schwab's Shades of Magic series. Every morning, Tansy takes tea to her employer, Lady Aster. She goes on a walk along the cliffs, waving to the cat on her way. She dusts the elaborate glass globes full of strange and beautiful worlds that Lady Aster creates. She cleans their cottage, Oubliette. Every day, exactly the same. Until, one afternoon, Tansy drops the globe containing a replica of the cottage, leaving a tiny fracture in the glass. And things begin to change. She finds an injured knight from another world, Merit, sleeping in their pigsty. Merit was raised to be a monster, a servant of the terrible Unmaker who once terrorised her world—but after betraying a fellow knight, she escaped through a crack between places and found herself in the Oubliette. There's a reason every day in the Oubliette is identical; that Tansy can't remember anything about her life before she joined Lady Aster's service. As she and Merit begin to explore the many worlds outside the Oubliette, they realise one story unites them the trail of war, violence and destruction left by the Unmaker, who they fear will one day return. And—however unwittingly—Tansy and Merit have opened the door. The crack in the Oubliette was only the beginning. Soon, as the Unmaker's story becomes increasingly ensnared with their own, both Tansy and Merit will have to are they who they were born to be, or the people they've become to each other?

Author

Lili Wilkinson
Lili Wilkinson
Author · 22 books
Lili Wilkinson is the award-winning author of eighteen books for young people, including The Erasure Initiative and After the Lights Go Out. Lili has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, and is a passionate advocate for YA and the young people who read it, establishing the Inky Awards at the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria. Her latest book is A Hunger of Thorns.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2026 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved