Wither (The Chemical Garden Trilogy)

Creepy and elegant, shocking and romantic, and delivers unexpected twists. Rhine lives in a world that is slowly decaying. Thanks to leaps in science and technology, scientists have created one perfect human generation, with an extraordinary flaw: their male offspring only live to age 25, and females to 20. At sixteen, Rhine is kidnapped at the order of a wealthy man, and forced to marry him. On the surface, her new life is beautiful, glamorous. But when Rhine befriends a servant, Gabriel, and begins to dig deeper into the hidden activities of the household, what she finds terrifies her, ...