The Bone Season

Critics Review

• Truly extraordinary and thrilling

  Andy Serkis

• A new breed of women authors are claiming fantasy for their own. Leading the charge is Samantha Shannon

  Harper's Bazaar

• A dark and exquisitely rendered fantasy unlike anything out there. The Bone Season is a must read

  Kami Garcia, No. 1 New York Times bestselling co-author of the Beautiful Creatures series

• Samantha Shannon has a hugely inventive talent and an imagination with seven league boots. She’s hit the ground running

  Susan Hill

• A richly dramatic and unadulterated pleasure, filled with horrors, wonders and charm

  Justina Robson, author of the Quantum Gravity series

• The book invokes both the political tyranny of George Orwell and the bucolic mythmaking of J.R.R. Tolkein

  USA Today

• A Hunger Games-esque debut

  Irish Daily Mail

• A rapid-fire wonder of a book, where clairvoyants and humans battle it out against scary monsters and super-creeps … The Bone Season is our next Twilight

  Marie Claire

• The Bone Season is more like the novel that JK Rowling and William Gibson never teamed up to write

  Wired

• A Hunger Games vibe and a few Shades of Grey

  Vanity Fair

• The Bone Season plots out a criminal underworld in a future where clairvoyancy exists; part fantasy, part dystopia, all intrigue. It’s a world of impressive scope, accompanied by Tolkienesque appendices, glossaries, maps and all

  Vogue

• It has conviction in spades … The Bone Season has the kids vs dystopia kick of The Hunger Games, but while it’s better written … It’s also got the star-crossed romance of Twilight

  SFX Magazine

• A dazzlingly brainy, witty and bewitching tale of outrageous courage, heroic compassion, transcendent love and the quest for freedom … the first in a thoughtful fantasy series by a brilliant young writer

  Booklist

• Marks the arrival of an extraordinarily talented British writer set to challenge the worldwide bestseller list domination of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games

  The British Fantasy Society

• The Bone Season, set in 2059, stems from Shannon’s interest in works such as The Handmaid’s Tale and A Clockwork Orange, which have backdrops of repressive regimes, and in John Donne’s poetry

  Sunday Times

• A complex and epic dystopia

  Bookseller

• Shannon writes so well that you stay interested, intrigued by the knife-edge motivation of character’s with “six-seater lips” whose “high-collard dresses always made her think of the gallows”. And although many of the paths walked by The Bone Season will already have been well travelled by fantasy readers, Shannon shows real skill in combining them so easily into an original and enjoyable escapist fictional world. Like so much recent young adult fiction, I suspect this series will appeal to the fearless teenager dwelling within many adults. The ending certainly gripped me to the marrow

  Daily Telegraph

• A dark, embattled, highly wrought fantasy … Whatever the future holds, there is no doubt that Samantha is the real thing, her own sternest critic and a born storyteller

  Observer

• On the quite wonderful style and craft of words Samantha displays I really cannot heap enough praise – it is remarkably self-assured writing, most especially for a debut … the most engrossing read I have had so far this year and frankly the most absorbing and compelling debut I’ve read since the superb Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Hugely recommended

  Forbidden Planet International Blog

• Shannon’s world is meticulously detailed and has a strong internal logic … Plenty of entertaining action … The pace of The Bone Season seldom slacks off, and the strong and resourceful Paige is a memorable heroine. This is one buzz book that just might merit its hype

  BookPage

• A remarkably accomplished debut

  SFX Magazine

• Impressively realised

  Sunday Times

• The Bone Season is enough to transport even hardened sceptics of the fantasy genre into its imaginative realm

  Metro

• Frightening and well-imagined … fascinating … The large talent on display here suggests just how good Shannon could get in the next six books of this promising series

  Washington Post

• Plenty for readers to get absorbed in … With six novels to go, and an author clearly driven to go deeper and deeper into a unique world, many will surely follow her

  Wall Street Journal

• Had me gripped as if in a vice …

  Samantha Shannon is a young writer with a future that looks anything but dystopian

  Stylist

• There’s a great imagination at work here, and Shannon’s just getting started

  People

• Dynamic and direct … There is an exciting breadth to Shannon’s world

  Evening Standard

• With echoes of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games and Trudi Canavan’s Black Magician trilogy, this is an excellent debut that will keep the reader gripped all the way to the end – and leave them asking when book two will be released

  Irish Examiner

• Don’t just suspend your disbelief – send it to the pictures and sink into this fabulous, epic fantasy thriller … Lavish, ebullient, escapist … Bring on the sequel

  The Times

• Fascinating … It will be very interesting to see where Shannon goes with this

  Daily Mail

• Samantha Shannon’s The Bone Season is my perfect cup of tea … My inner teenager enjoyed every last word

  Sarah Vine, Daily Mail Books of the Year