Format: 448 pages, Hardcover
Release Date: September 15, 2026
Publisher: HarperCollins
Source: Publisher
Genre: YA, Alt History, Dystopian
Source: Publisher
Genre: YA, Alt History, Dystopian
The Secret History meets Ready Player One in #1 bestselling author Ava Reid’s brand-new, thrilling alternate-future duology, where four teens are recruited into a century-long virtual Cold War until they discover the truth and decide to fight back.
The top students at Valeran Academy should be in jail. Instead, they were offered a way out: enroll and pledge themselves to the nation. In their alternate future where the Cold War still rages, America needs patriots—don’t call them spies.
In the halls of America’s most covert military academy, all that matters is who is number one. Four students rise to the top: Julian, the politician; Klaudia, the strategist; Nadiya, the soldier; and Giselle, the beauty queen with a secret that could change everything.
As they compete for the top ranking that would free them from their gilded cage, the four feel strangely drawn together. Underneath every rivalry lurks a desperate yearning, bringing the strongest of them down to their knees.
Too soon, they’re ripped from the safe walls of their school and recruited for a mysterious training mission that their elusive headmaster tells them is only a simulation. But the four teens quickly realize that they are merely pawns, designed to play off of each other in a dangerous game. Even their blossoming feelings will be used against them in this game of war.
To win, they will have to question everything: each other, themselves, even their very understanding of reality.
It was only supposed to be a game. But now lives and hearts are on the line. Are you brave enough to play?
Ava Reid's Winterveil is the first part of a two-part duology. The premise begins with: In a world where Gorbachev was assassinated and the Cold War dragged on, the eerie tension of the Cold War combines with futuristic concerns like AI, the metaverse, and the surveillance state. Part ripped-from-the-headlines and part history, the publisher frames it as The Secret History meets Ready Player One, or The Secret History meets The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
The point of divergence is the 1984 assassination of Mikhail Gorbachev on the steps of Downing Street. The thaw never arrives. By 2037, the Soviet Union still exists, proxy wars continue across continents, defense contractors (notably Auric) and neural technology lock the stalemate in place, and a “third Red Scare” atmosphere colors American institutions. Valeran Academy, hidden in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and founded in 1963 under Kennedy as a joint CIA/DOD project, has no application process.
It recruits precocious teenage offenders and commutes their sentences in exchange for training as strategists, cryptographers, hackers, and weapons specialists—the future pipeline for intelligence work. Official language insists “We are not training spies—we are training patriots.” Students compete on a public ranking board; top placement is the path out of the gilded cage. Curriculum blends classical strategy (including the Melian Dialogue: “The strong do what they will, and the weak endure what they must”) with neural interfaces and war simulations.
The four leads
- Julian Joyce-Young III: Elected mayor of Boston at eighteen (on a dare, in some accounts), then impeached and arrested for bribery and embezzlement. Disowned by a powerful political-business dynasty. Charming orator placed on the Strategy and Statecraft track; his chapters carry much of the political and familial pressure.
- Klaudia Shimonova: Leningrad-born, Upper West Side–raised, arrested at fifteen after forging her father’s trading credentials and turning them into roughly $10 million. Holds the academy’s rank-one spot for years. Treats social interaction as a game-theory problem; Reid’s strongest character to date—a girl who made herself cold because the alternative was her father’s hands.
- Giselle Buckley: Small-town West Virginia pageant queen with a scientifically verified eidetic memory capable of projecting vivid visual memories into other minds. Arrested for credit-card theft. Her ability becomes central to the technology plot.
- Nadiya Karam: Weapons and tactical prodigy, orphaned and raised inside the academy as the personal ward of headmaster Dr. Cornelius Iver. Third-generation Lebanese American; carries a dangerous family secret tied to the neural systems the school uses. Forms the book’s primary sapphic romance with Giselle.
Archival inserts—press clippings, redacted files, scrapped CIA language insisting “we are not training spies—we are training patriots”—do more world-building than exposition dumps. The school's competitive engine, which Reid links to her time in competitive Pokémon’s VGC format, produces the book’s best set piece: Thymos.exe, a student-built neural strategy game whose tournament final collides rankings, romance, and plot on one stage.
When the four are pulled into Traumstadt, a simulated East German town whose mission parameters keep being rewritten, the novel finally becomes the spy thriller it promised. Klaudia is the reason to read it. She is the sharpest character Reid has written: a girl who made herself cold because warmth was unsafe, and who remains legible even when she is calculating. The ensemble works best when the four are forced to choose cooperation over defection inside a game the state designed.
That prisoner’s-dilemma frame is the book’s real subject: institutions that recruit already-failed adolescents, call the exploitation a second chance, and then use their minds as infrastructure. The weaknesses are real. The first act spends too long on cafeteria politics and the ranking board before the plot arrives. Several adult antagonists—a tech billionaire, a handler who speaks in riddles—are broad enough to hate and too thin to fear.
Historical texture is suggestive rather than rigorous; the point of divergence is clear, but the half-century of altered Cold War that follows is sketched more than built. And the ending does not end. Leads are scattered, a major system (Project Dreamscape, a shared reality powered by neural impulses and anchored by an eidetic mind) is revealed and then left mid-crisis, and the book cuts out in a way that will satisfy readers who want a duology hook and frustrate anyone who wanted a complete novel. Content is upper YA in the mature sense: consensual and non-consensual sexual situations (not graphically explicit, but not coy about lead-up or aftermath), an attempted assault, parental abuse, a recounted sibling suicide, gun violence, and training that crosses into torture.
