The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction – but assassins are getting closer to her door.
Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.
Across the dark sea, Tané has trained to be a dragonrider since she was a child, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.
Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.
Shannon retells Saint George and the dragon from the other side, and Kirkus praised the satisfying twists that invert the legend. The best idea, as readers keep pointing out, is a world of rival religions that are each partly right and partly wrong. The story turns on what people were told versus what actually happened.
The price is time. The first half is slow, and it takes a while to care about the court characters. Some readers say it needed a harder edit, or splitting in two. The second half moves, with vivid dragon action and Tané and her dragon earning real investment. The ending feels rushed to some. Still, it finishes. You close the book with a conclusion in hand, and in big fantasy that's rarer than it should be.
Kirkus liked the way Shannon refreshes old fantasy machinery, though the explanations can bog things down. Publishers Weekly found the epic capable but the finale hurried. It was a 2019 Goodreads Choice nominee in Fantasy and placed fourth.
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The Roots of Chaos
2 books in catalog
Spanning speculative world-building from dystopian near-future visions to sprawling high fantasy, the fantasy novels of the Roots of Chaos cycle and The Bone Season series have reached audiences worldwide. Samantha Shannon is a New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling British author born in London in 1991 whose work spans expansive epic fantasy and paranormal dystopian fiction.
Born in Hammersmith, London, Samantha Shannon grew up in Ruislip and attended St Anne's College, Oxford, where she studied English Language and Literature from 2010 to 2013. During her time at Oxford, she specialized in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Principles of Film Criticism. In 2013, at twenty-one years old, she published her debut novel, The Bone Season, the internationally bestselling first installment in a seven-book fantasy sequence. She later broadened her bibliography with the standalone epic fantasy novel The Priory of the Orange Tree, which became a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards 2020 and sold over a million English-language copies worldwide. She extended this setting with the prequel A Day of Fallen Night, published in February 2023 as an instant #1 Sunday Times bestseller.
Shannon's fiction is characterized by intricate world-building, multi-layered magic systems, and women-centric political structures. Across her dystopian and high-fantasy works, she presents detailed lore, grand political conflicts, and distinct character perspectives. The Roots of Chaos cycle emphasizes themes of female empowerment, authority, and resilience against ancient threats, while her dystopian fiction investigates state control, clairvoyance, and resistance. Influenced by her academic training in literature and film, Shannon constructs immersive settings and sustained narrative tension across both long-form series and massive standalone epics.
