From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes the story of three siblings who, upon the death of their father, are forced to reckon with their long-festering rivalries, dangerous abilities, and the crushing weight of all their unrealized adolescent potential.

Where there’s a will, there’s a war.

Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne.

Or at least, so they like to think.

Meredith, textbook accomplished eldest daughter and the head of her own groundbreaking biotech company, has recently cured mental illness. You’re welcome! If only her father’s fortune wasn’t her last hope for keeping her journalist ex-boyfriend from exposing what she really is: a total fraud.

Arthur, second-youngest congressman in history, fights the good fight every day of his life. And yet, his wife might be leaving him, and he’s losing his re-election campaign. But his dead father’s approval in the form of a seat on the Wrenfare throne might just turn his sinking ship around.

Eilidh, once the world’s most famous ballerina, has spent the last five years as a run-of-the-mill marketing executive at her father’s company after a life-altering injury put an end to her prodigious career. She might be lacking in accolades compared to her siblings, but if her father left her everything, it would finally validate her worth—by confirming she’d been his favorite all along.

On the pipeline of gifted kid to clinically depressed adult, nobody wins—but which Wren will come out on top?

Olivie Blake, in her acknowledgements, identifies her biggest inspiration for this entertaining tour through a dysfunctional family in crisis as the 2001 film The Royal Tennenbaums (which itself drew on Orson Welles 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons). However, there are some very contemporary resonances in Blake’s alternative present, with its evocation of a seething mass of corporate competition, fraud, and corner cutting. Rather than Microsoft vs Apple battling for the world’s IT souls, we have Wrenfare vs Tyche in a battle to profit from neuromancy, a blend of magic and technology inhabiting not so much a Silicon Valley of tech bro’s as a magic valley of … well magitech bro’s.  Rather than acquisitive and intrusively plagiarising AI that promises to turn everyone into a best-selling author at the click of a button, we have Meredith Wren’s great uploadable innovation of Chirp which will make everyone happy. (Being a Best-selling author? Being happy? You can see where I’m finding the parallels right?)

The catalyst that drags three turning 30, siblings together is the sudden death of their father, Thayer Wren, founder and CEO of multi-trillion dollar corporation Wrenfare. Over the course of a hectic week, Meredith, her younger brother Arthur and the baby of the family Eilidh (pronounced like Hayley but without the H), have to confront personal and professional crises as they explore the many failed relationships of their respective pasts – including relationships with each other and with their father.

Blake’s prose captures the breathless chaos of the Wren siblings’ lives through an omniscient and opinionated narrator whose fondness for breaking the fourth wall meets its apotheosis when they step into the story as a fully-fledged first-person point of view protagonist. A transformation that makes perfect sense of the book’s striking opening line

Meredith Wren, a fucking asshole, not that it matters at this stage of the narrative but it’s worth pointing out, sat blinded by the overhead lights …

Meredith, the eldest, never appreciated by her father, has funded her Chirp invention by hawking it to his detested rival at Tyche, but the desperation to succeed in spite of him, or just to spite him, has led her down some dark paths.

Arthur, after a successful baseball career appears to be nearing the end of a very short (two year) political career facing electoral defeat amidst the failure to deliver any of his progressive agenda.

The bills he proposed, which came from a place of forward-leaning—nay, radical!—progressivism were functionally toothless by the time they came before committee, rendering him a sort of new-age jester who’d accomplished nothing but the turntable warp of a sitcom laugh track.

Eilidh, promising ballerina whose career was ruined by a car accident injury, has been given employment within Wrenfare – more a comfortable sinecure than a policy driving executive – but alone of the siblings she is not estranged from their father, his favouritism extending to Tuesday afternoon lunch dates.

But what about the magic? Well Blake eschews any kind of Sandersonian system. The siblings – and others in the story – do have magical powers, but there is a kind of randomness to them like the peculiarities of the children in Miss Peregrine’s School for Peculiar Children, or the special abilities that the various X-men and X-Women manifest, or the superpowers that all Jen’s friends (but not Jen herself) have in the Irish Sitcom Extraordinary.

Arthur for example, has an ability to interfere – in unpredictable ways – with electrical devices, which can create an interesting sound and light effect at a party, or a blackout, or a fire-hazard of a short circuit. However, the increasing randomness of this talent has restricted his ability to fulfil his duties in the United States Congress, so he has taken himself off to indulge in an entirely different kind of congress in a thruple with the exotic British aristocratic Phillipa multipally-barrelled-something-or-other and the endlessly charming racing driver Yves.

Eilidh’s talent is even more bizarre and hardly more useful than Arthur’s though it does get her out of the odd deadly situation, while Meredith – well as the daughter of a successful capitalist – let’s just say she’s tried to commercialise her talent.

The book’s cinematic inspiration comes through in Blake’s deft deployment of an ensemble cast in a variety of settings having tense one-to-ones or fractious group discussions in and around Thayer’s architecturally inspired but emotionally barren family home. I was delighted to find my growing sense that the narrative felt like a film or a stage play suddenly validated when a couple of chapters broke into screenplay mode. It’s slightly ironic that a book which feels like a film, should be inspired by a film (The Royal Tenenbaum’s) that was ostensibly based on a non-existent novel .

Blake’s prose is wonderfully smooth and immersive. My kindle highlights will normally pick out a collection of sharp lines that have caught my eye. However, in Gifted & Talented I have far more whole glorious paragraphs highlighted, extended sections that weave together character, dialogue and setting into elegant observation prose. Besides the many LOL’s (because this is a funny book) and “nice lines” I have contemporaneous notes like “lovely prose to swim in” and “It’s just a delight.”

I will limit myself to a couple of shorter quotes.

Meredith’s boyfriend Cass delivering a home truth

“You climb every step of this tower and then you lock yourself inside—because this is it Meredith. This is the top, and there’s no other way to make it. It might be lonely once you get here, but nobody chooses it for the company. They choose it for the view”

Or Arthur thinking about his current lover

He had always loved waking to Philippa curled into him like the slice of a crescent moon, all soft contentment and gentle narcissism, a kitten waiting to be stroked.

Around the core cast of the three siblings Blake has populated her narrative with a delightfully varied array of fully fleshed out characters, including Thayer’s harassed Personal Assistant Dzhuliya struggling with abrupt job insecurity and the demands and tantrums of the bereaved children, Gillian – Arthur’s wife who performs the role with the efficient devotion of a perfect PA even to the extent of not sleeping with her boss, and there is Jamie – Meredith’s first love and journalistic nemesis, poised to bring the whole world crashing down on a woman he is still obsessed by. However, my favourite is definitely the racing driver Yves who drifts through events offering everyone the most potent of edibles and enjoying the carefree existence of one who is always living in the present moment, never the past or the future.

He had a frighteningly short attention span, so that was probably part of it, but also he had a way of capitulating to the whims of the universe that made him a less damageable type of person.

Which is significant because everybody else in the book is pretty damaged by their pasts and uncertain about their futures, even Thayer’s favourite Eilidh.

He had never trained her. He protected her. How could he trust her to succeed when he had never let her fail.

Thayer himself, even in death, towers over proceedings like any of our 2025 Techbro’s, with references to his eclectic ambitions “trying to go to fucking space” and the habits of wealth “Everything Arthur knew about the world suggested that wealth, at Wrenfare’s scale, was the one thing that didn’t have any rules.”

With its elegant prose – flowing like a stream in flood – and its sure footed switching between settings – braiding varied character arcs in an intricate weave – Gifted & Talented is a delight of chaos, the closest you will come to watching a film while reading a book.

Gifted and Talented is due for publication 3rd April 2025 – you can pre-order your copy HERE

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