Tethers: the Tethers trilogy by Jack Croxall

‘You can’t save someone from their own decisions.’ In the wake of a cold Victorian winter, Karl Scheffer and Esther Emerson discover an anonymous journal filled with strange passages and bizarre scribblings. The journal soon draws them into a covert and sinister conspiracy, a conspiracy centred around an otherworldly artefact with the power to change everything … Karl and Esther have spent almost every day of their thirteen years in the quiet market town of Shraye. Stifled by their rural surroundings and frustrated by their unfulfilled ambitions, they find the allure of the journal’s mysterious pages impossible to ignore. The book seems to be beckoning them away from Shraye, away from their homes and towards the coast where an unsolved disappearance has set a dark chain of events in motion. The voyage Karl and Esther soon find themselves undertaking is one of desperate importance and true peril. It will change the way they see the world, and each other, forever.