Edith Sharpe has grown up knowing what is expected of her.

The Crown provides order. Service is an honour. Duty is something to be proud of. And somewhere above it all are the pilots — figures of daring, glamour and almost impossible courage.

None more so than Eden Prowse.

To Edith, Eden is everything a pilot should be: brilliant, fearless and fiercely loyal. When Edith is drawn closer to the world she has admired from a distance, she finds herself among extraordinary machines, dangerous missions and people whose lives have been shaped by service to the Crown.

But admiration is easier from a distance.

As Edith begins to see the people behind the uniforms, small inconsistencies become harder to ignore. Events do not quite match their official accounts. Questions lead to other questions, and the certainty with which she once understood duty, loyalty and the Crown itself begins quietly to shift.

Eden, meanwhile, has loyalties of her own — to her family, to those who fly beside her, and to a promise that may ultimately matter more than any order.

Edith must decide not only what she believes, but how much of what she has always believed was ever hers to begin with.

Paperweights is the first novel in the Under the Crown series — an alternate-world story of flight, friendship, family and the dangerous distance between what we are told and what we discover for ourselves.

The September 2026 Phaedra's Books edition is the current and definitive edition of Paperweights.