So she enters the Glory Race, which has no rules prohibiting a Renter from participating. Denied a loan, blacklisted from the black market, and threatened with her father’s order to enter the marriage draft, Koral’s running out of options. With Koral’s sister, Liria, already sick from a wasting disease, the family cannot afford to go without, or live on the tiny stipend the Landers will give them. But the last hunt goes badly, injuring Koral’s brother, Emrik, and putting the family deeper in debt. Without a mate for her, there will be no maristag foals. Every four years, the Landers race maristag-drawn chariots in the Glory Race, a deadly competition for the title of Champion, which grants a fortune to the winner.Īlready stuck between worlds, despised by Renters for her family’s slightly higher station and looked down on by wealthy Landers, Koral’s life suddenly gets worse when their stables have only one maristag left for the year.

Koral’s family have been Hunters for generations, given the single task of hunting maristag, dangerous and beautiful creatures that can run on land and live within Ophir’s dangerous waters. Koral Hunter was given schooling among the Landers, but is beholden to the same rules as the Renters, stuck outside under the same hot sun, denied the underground structures and sun protections the Landers enjoy.

But despite the harsh landscape and the monstrous creators that inhabit the islands where humanity landed, they’ve still divided themselves into a strict caste system: Landers ruling over Renters, with a single family of Hunters stuck in the middle. The Empyrean Elders and their technology brought people to this new world with great hopes. On Ophir, the planet where Tanvi Berwah’s Monsters Born and Made is set, humanity may have once had that chance.

Settling on a new planet gives the appearance of offering humanity a new chance to be something better: to overcome established battles for power, to resist the temptation to raise one group above the others.

Monsters born and made by tanvi berwah