Such is the case with Samantha Shannon, a 22-year-old Oxford student whose first novel, The Bone Season, has netted her a six-figure advance for a projected seven-book series with Bloomsbury, with the film rights already snapped up Imaginarium.

It’s difficult not to approach with raised expectationsĮvery so often in publishing, the magic debut happens: a process whereby some sinfully young and talented writer is plucked from obscurity, given a massive advance and touted as a wunderkind, such that their first novel breaks into our collective awareness on a cresting wave of publicity so glowing and ubiquitous as to make even the most well-adjusted and charitable author shudder with jealousy. Because Nashira Sargas, the ruler of Sheol I and Warden’s consort, wants Paige’s gifts for herself – and once she takes them, Paige will die. With only outcasts for allies, Paige must learn who to trust and how to survive, fast. For behind the predations of Scion lurks an even bigger battle: the struggle between the scheming, eternal Rephaites and the brutal, cannibalistic Emim, a second race seeking entry to our world and held in check only by the combined efforts of Scion, human voyants, and Rephs. Put into the care of the Warden Arcturus Mesarthim – a powerful Reph with secrets of his own – Paige is forced to contend, not only with the barbaric rules of this strange, parasitic society, but also its politics. When an unexpected encounter forces Paige to find a brutal new use for her gifts, she finds herself captured by Scion and taken to an impossible place: the lost city of Oxford, now called Sheol I and repurposed as a penal colony run by the Rephaites, a race of beings whose existence, while known to Scion, is a secret kept from the general human populace. Born with a gift that allows her to enter the minds of other voyants, nineteen year old Paige Mahoney is forced to live a double life: nominally the privileged daughter of one of Scion’s top scientists, she is known in other circles as the Pale Dreamer, an enforcer for a powerful criminal syndicate of voyants.

Two hundred years after the Bloody King, Edward VII, reputedly unleashed a plague of clairvoyance on the world, voyants have struggled against the stigma of being unnatural, while normal humans – amaurotics – have worked to oppress and kill them under the auspices of Scion, an all-encompassing, dictatorial government. In an alternate, future version of London, Scion rules all. Born with a gift that allows her to enter the minds of other voyants, nineteen year old Paige Mahoney is forced to live a double life

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