Sixteen-year-old Jack gets drunk and is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is kidnapped. He escapes, narrowly. The only person he tells is his best friend, Conner. When they arrive in London as planned for summer break, a stranger hands Jack a pair of glasses. Through the lenses, he sees another world called Marbury. There is war in Marbury. It is a desolate and murderous place where Jack is responsible for the survival of two younger boys. Conner is there, too. But he’s trying to kill them. Meanwhile, Jack is falling in love with an English girl, and afraid he’s losing his mind. Conner tells Jack it’s going to be okay. But it’s not. Andrew Smith has written his most beautiful and personal novel yet, as he explores the nightmarish outer limits of what trauma can do to our bodies and our minds.

Marbury is another world, a dark world that best friends Jack Whitmore and Conner Kirk have fallen into before. A stranger had given Jack a pair of glasses – it’s through the lenses that the boys get to Marbury. Told through Conner’s point of view, THE KING OF MARBURY asks whether Marbury is only in Jack and Conner’s minds, or if it might actually be real. You decide.

Best friends Jack and Conner can't stay away from Marbury. It's partly because of their obsession with this alternate world and the unresolved war that still wages there. But it's also because forces in Marbury―including the darkest of the dark, who were not revealed in The Marbury Lens ―are beckoning the boys back in order to save their friends . . . and themselves. The boys try to destroy the lens that transports them to Marbury. But that dark world is not so easily reckoned with. Reality and fantasy, good and evil―Andrew Smith's masterpiece closes the loop that began with The Marbury Lens . But is it really closed? Can it ever be?