It is gloriously overdramatic and passionate, just how BookTok likes it. It hits shelves on 23 August, and BookTok – a thriving sub-community of avid readers on TikTok – is going crazy for this story which hits the sweet spot between the deadly competition of The Hunger Games, and the “romantasy” of Sarah J Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses. Last month, Universal preemptively bought the film rights for, in her words, “more zeros than I’ve seen in my life”. A week later, Lightlark had gone to auction and she had a six-figure deal with Amulet Books. The next day, however, she woke up to see her video had been viewed more than a million times. Maybe there wasn’t a market for Lightlark, a young adult story she had been writing and rewriting for years, to no interest from publishers. Maybe the books world was right, she thought. Then, on 13 March 2021, she decided to take to TikTok, asking her followers if they would: “read a book about a cursed island that only appears once every 100 years to host a game that gives the six rulers of the realm a chance to break their curses.” One of the rulers must die, the short video revealed, “even as love complicates everything” for the heroine, Isla Crown.Īster didn’t expect much, especially when she checked in a few hours later to see that her post had only clocked up about 1,000 views. The book had tanked during the pandemic and she had been dropped by her literary agent. H aving finally published her first novel, Alex Aster was feeling disheartened.