Burn - Patrick Ness

Set in 1957, this novel is INCREDIBLE. It is the holy grail combination of intelligent, well-written and page-turning: a clever meshing of a cold war and civil rights context with dragons! Doesn't sound like it should work, and yet it really, really does. I adore Patrick Ness and read everything he publishes. Like Atwood or Ishiguro, he's a a diverse and genre-hopping author so loving one of his novels doesn't automatically equate to loving them all. One thing I have noticed in several of Ness' works is his positive (and almost incidental) representation of LGBT relationships. In this story this is the tender relationship between Malcolm (also a teen assassin!) and Nelson, previously in Breathe it was protagonist Adam. There is an useful article here on Ness' views on this topic.