Sanet Oberholzer interviews Samantha Shannon
Samantha Shannon has become a BookTok phenomenon and it's easy to see why, writes Sanet Oberholzer

The Bone Season: Author's Preferred Text *****
Samantha Shannon
Bloomsbury
“When I was nine, I wrote this story about a magical princess of the moon. I remember stapling it together and putting it in an envelope. All I put on the envelope was “Dear Penguin”. There was no return address, and I never saw that story again. My grandma walked me to the letterbox. I don’t know why we both thought it would somehow make it to Penguin. That was the first time I remember writing a story and wanting it to be published.”
It’s one of the sweetest origin stories I’ve been told, and it belongs to author Samantha Shannon. Our chat provided a rare opportunity to interact with the British author ahead of the release of the anticipated fifth book in The Bone Season series, The Dark Mirror, to be released early this year.
It follows the release of The Bone Season: Author's Preferred Text of the first book in the fantasy series, 10 years after its initial release. “I think that if The Bone Season had been a stand-alone, I would have just left it. When you write novels you accept, to some degree, that each one is a time capsule. But, because The Bone Season is the first book in a series that I’m still writing, and because the gulf in my writing is quite extreme compared to what it was 10 years ago, I felt that the first book needed some care and attention,” Shannon explains.
She was 19 when she started writing The Bone Season and 21 when it was published. “It could have been a much stronger introduction to the series if I had known how to convey my worldbuilding better, if I had just carved out slightly leaner character arcs and if I had known the world better at the time.”
The Bone Season follows protagonist Paige Mahoney who lives in London in 2059. The ruling Republic of Scion has been oppressing clairvoyants — humans who can interact with the spirit world — across Europe for two centuries. Paige lives in the heart of London’s criminal underworld, but she’s not just any clairvoyant. She possesses abilities that soon put her on the radar of someone who would gladly have them for herself. As Paige comes to grips with the new world she’s been thrust into, desperately looking for a way out, readers are introduced to the first segment of an utterly beguiling series.
“Each of The Bone Season books has its own subgenre,” Shannon says of the series that is set to stretch over seven instalments. “The first one was a jailbreak, the second one is a murder mystery, the third one is a heist, the fourth one is like a political espionage thriller, and the fifth one I call the road trip book because it goes to several different settings.”
A self-proclaimed gamer, Shannon references Margaret Atwood, Malory Blackman, Suzanne Collins, John Wyndham, Garth Nix, and Cornelia Funke when I ask her about authors who have informed her writing. As for the rest of her inspiration in dreaming up this world, the idea of The Bone Season was inspired by Shannon’s time studying in Oxford. “I think often Oxford is portrayed as being magical in fiction. To some degree, there is magic in the city. But it’s also a place where there is power that’s distributed unequally, there are some quite strange traditions, and there is a whole internal jargon. It lends itself to be a dystopian setting in my mind.”
Added to this experience, Shannon had also done an internship in Covent Garden, a district in London where you can buy crystal balls and tarot card. “I was quite fascinated by the idea of a magic system that was based on clairvoyance and divination because I didn’t think I’d really seen that before where it had been done in a very structured way.” And so, The Bone Season was born.
Since being published, Shannon’s work has been translated into 28 languages. With the release of The Priory of the Orange Tree in 2019, the stage was set for her to become a BookTok phenomenon. A Day of Fallen Night followed in 2023.
Every bit worthy of being called an epic, The Priory of the Orange Tree is the first book to be published as part of The Roots of Chaos series and is set in a fictional world in which divided continents must soon unite should they wish to defeat a darkness that comes from the belly of the earth. Whereas The Bone Season is set in a dystopian London of the future, The Priory of the Orange Tree unfurls in a world of dragons, mages, queens, knights, and fierce fighters.
The two series read as though they’d been written by two completely different authors, which might come as a shock at first. But both series have two things in common.
The first is Shannon’s incredible sense of worldbuilding. Far removed from her fear of not knowing how to convey her worldbuilding 10 years ago, today Shannon is a queen of the craft. Comparable to the likes of Sarah J Maas, her books also require glossaries and notes for readers to refer to at the back. It takes a bit of time coming to grips with these worlds, but once you do, it makes for a compelling read.
The second is a quality of feminist fantasy that gives her books a depth of character she manages with aplomb. “There is something empowering, I think, in female characters not having to encounter sexism. As a female reader, I would often find myself bracing myself in fantasy novels for either misogyny and/or sexual violence against women. I think there should always be space for those types of stories, but I don’t think there should be an expectation of the genre.”
Shannon says she chose to consciously step away from that in her rewrite of The Bone Season. “When I wrote the first version, you could sometimes see bits of misogyny leaking in. I think that was just because I had grown up under a patriarchy and, at the time, I just didn’t know that fantasy couldn’t be sexist. I actually removed those things from the Author’s Preferred Text in the end.”
The Priory of The Orange Tree is more consciously feminist. One never quite knows if the knights being referred to are male or female, and women, it’s been accepted, can do anything men can do without anyone thinking it strange. Shannon also explores narratives around childbirth and motherhood, themes she takes even further in A Day of Fallen Night.
“If [readers] prefer dystopia urban fantasy, they can jump into The Bone Season. If they prefer more traditional high fantasy, they can choose The Priory of the Orange Tree,” Shannon says.
She says The Priory of The Orange Tree is her most successful book and A Day of Fallen Night is her best. While The Bone Season is her favourite series, she struggles to choose a favourite book between The Mime Order and The Mask Falling — her love songs to the cities of London and Paris, respectively.
If you're just starting out, Shannon says The Bone Season’s Author’s Preferred Text is a great one to jump into. Rich, layered, and gripping, with a relatable heroine at its core. Once you’re done, you can rest assured knowing Shannon is working on the sixth book of The Bone Season series, which is set to come out in 2026, and a third book in The Roots of Chaos series. These books are big and long and filled with fantastical intrigue. The perfect recipe for long road trips and late nights of holiday reading.
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