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PREDATORY NATURES

Amy Goldsmith

A teen girl's dream job aboard a luxury train derails when she discovers the cargo being transported --a carriage full of strange and beautiful plants-- whose flowering façade may hide deadly thorns beneath.
Lara Williams is desperate to get away. When she gets a job working aboard the luxury train The Banebury for her gap year, she knows: this is her chance to reinvent herself, after the incident that wrecked her relationships and her college prospects several months ago. At first, the train is everything Lara expected, a five-star escape from her past. Even after she learns that her ex-friend, Rhys, who she definitely did not have feelings for before their relationship imploded, is one of her new coworkers, she's determined to make things work.

But on the first night of their journey, the trip takes a strange turn when two mysterious carriages, filled with an array of beautiful and rare plants, are attached in the middle of the night. With them come a pair of siblings. Gwen and Gwydion are wealthy, Welsh, and alluring as they are odd. Not to mention incredibly protective of their botanical cargo.

The siblings claim the plants are for research, yet Lara can't shake the feeling that there's something... otherworldly about them. Something that calls to her, night after night, whispering in her dreams, and which wants to ensure the Banebury never reaches its final destination.

Soon, Lara will learn: you can't outrun your troubles. You have to grab them by their roots. And if she can't unearth the secrets of the Banebury, they might drag her down for good.

Amy Goldsmith grew up on the south coast of England, obsessed with obscure 70s horror movies and antiquarian ghost stories. She studied Psychology at the University of Sussex and, after gaining her Postgraduate Certificate in Education, moved to inner London to teach. Now, she lives back on the south coast where she still teaches English and spends her weekends trawling antiques shops for haunted mirrors. She is the author of Those We Drown, Our Wicked Histories and Predatory Natures.
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Published 2025-06-01 by Delacorte Press

Comments

Effortlessly captivating and luxurious, Predatory Natures will ensnare you in wicked thorns and dangerous flowers, and you will not be able to put it down.

A deliciously tangled and claustrophobic mystery, blending the all-too-real horror of toxic relationships with the seductiveness of giving yourself wholeheartedly to the dark. It cements Goldsmith as one of the most exciting YA horror writers working today.