Galveston

Magic returned to the world in 1899, and in 2004 the island of Galveston exists twice over. There is the ordinary town, poor, storm-battered, cut off, governed by the Grand Duchess and short of medicine. And there is Momus's Mardi Gras, the endless masked carnival into which the god of the god-touched drew half the city and never released it, where the revellers do not age and the rules are the rules of a party that has gone on too long. Joshua Cane, an apothecary's son with a talent for herbs and a considerable stock of resentment, is arrested for a crime he did not commit and exiled. Sloane Gardner, the Duchess's daughter, has crossed into the Mardi Gras seeking help her mother's failing health requires, and comes back changed and short of something. Stewart writes the ruined island with the specificity of somebody who knows the Texas Gulf coast, and his magic is a matter of debt, obligation and bad bargains rather than power. It is a novel about class in a small town, about what a community owes its awkward members, and about growing up in a place that has decided who you are.