The Bone Season

The year is 2059. Nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working in the criminal underworld of Scion London, based at Seven Dials, employed by a man named Jaxon Hall. Her job: to scout for information by locating human minds. Paige is a dreamwalker, the rarest type of clairvoyant, and, in the world of Scion, she commits treason simply by breathing. It is raining on the day her life changes forever. Attacked, drugged, and kidnapped, Paige is transported to Oxford—a city kept secret for two hundred years, controlled by a powerful, otherworldly race. Paige is assigned to Warden, a Rephaite with mysterious motives. He is her master, her trainer, her natural enemy. But if Paige wants to regain her freedom, she must allow herself to be nurtured in this prison where she is meant to die. She must absorb all the knowledge she gains access to, and she must hone her gift. ==Development==

Shannon began writing The Bone Season while working for book agent David Godwin and attending St Anne's College, Oxford. She began using the environment of St Anne's College and the overall University of Oxford architecture and landscaping as an inspiration for the novel's Sheol I penal colony setting. An interviewer noted that Oxford has many "impossibly neat, manicured lawns and well-tended buildings that act as a kind of tree-ring-dating window onto Britain's architectural past (and present)." ==Reception==

Prior to the release of The Bone Season the book was compared to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and Shannon was often referred to as "the next J.K. Rowling". Newspapers drew comparisons due to Shannon signing with the same UK publisher as Rowling did for her Harry Potter series and due to both series comprising seven novels. However Atlantic Wire reporter Arit John commented that the "steady drumbeat of press ... has led to comparisons to nearly every mainstream female fantasy and sci-fi novelist with name recognition". Critical reception for the book has been mostly positive. USA Today commented upon a similarity to the Harry Potter novels in their positive review for The Bone Season, opining that the book's premise was "awfully familiar in certain aspects" to the aforementioned series while also stating that it had "fresh ideas, excellent original concepts and, best of all, an impressive new voice for fantasy literature." NPR also noted the same comparison, but remarked that it was more similar to The Hunger Games than the Potter series. The Telegraph's review also mentioned that the book was similar to The Hunger Games and commented that the plot would be familiar to fantasy readers but that Shannon "shows real skill in combining them so easily into an original and enjoyably escapist fictional world." == Television adaptation ==

Television rights to The Bone Season were acquired by Rainmaker Content in 2021, with an eight-part miniseries planned. In November 2025, Samantha Shannon confirmed on social media that the rights had been returned to her and no adaptation was currently in the works. ==Series==

Prequel novella, The Pale Dreamer, was released as an e-book in 2016. The second installment, The Mime Order was released on 27 January 2015. The third installment, The Song Rising was released on 7 March 2017. In 2020 Shannon released an additional e-book novella, The Dawn Chorus, set between the third and fourth novels. The fourth installment, The Mask Falling, was released 26 January 2021. In April 2021 Shannon confirmed that work was underway on an untitled fifth installment, with publication expected in 2024. The completed series is expected to have a total of seven novels, with the sixth installment expected to be published in 2026. Supplementary work On the Merits of Unnaturalness, being an extraordinary treatise upon the Seven Orders of Clairvoyance, was published in 2016. ==References==