Carve the Mark

Carve the Mark is a science fiction novel for young adults by the American writer Veronica Roth, published on 17 January 2017.

The story is set among nine planets that have agreed to a general order kept by an assembly which travels between them, and on a world where the power that each person develops when they grow up, their currentgift, decides what sort of life they can have. Akos and Cyra come from cultures that are enemies of each other: he is captured and brought to her country as a servant, and she is the daughter of its ruler, whose gift means that any contact with her causes pain. What the two of them can do for each other is limited to the situations in which their gifts are useful, and the novel follows that arrangement as the authority of the assembly and the rule of Cyra's father both come under strain. Roth wrote a sequel, The Fates Divide, which followed in 2018, and the two books are told from the viewpoints of the same pair.