Tiko has never seen a city. He has never tasted anything but factory blocks. And he has never won a thing.

But his sister Kira is dying. Six weeks left, the village doctor said. Maybe. And the only thing that can save her, the only thing that can save Sylvara, the parched land that has never won anything, is a victory in The Open.

Once a year, representatives from every nation gather at Verdara in Gravenmark, the industrial city where the factories never sleep and the muskrats never look away. They compete. They fall. They vanish. And those who win? They get more than food. They get survival.

Sylvara has never won.

When Tiko leaves his mother and his sick sister behind, with his seventy-year-old grandfather as his caddy and a club that remembers a world before everything fell apart, he doesn't know what to expect. He only knows that the courses are rigged, that the officials look the other way, and that the game, if it even is a game, is bigger than any single player.

But he also knows something that Gravenmark hasn't bargained for.

When you have nothing to lose, you play differently.

Verdara Open is a dark, heartbreaking tale of shame and pride, of the bond between siblings in a world that leaves no room for it, and of what happens when a game stops being a game and starts becoming a war.