There are as many pages devoted to Queen Sabran’s marital status as there are to figuring out how to save the world entire. Shades of Dutch, Mongolian, African, Norse, and Arabic cultures appear as well to create a diverse cast of characters.īut while the world-building is excellent, The Priory of the Orange Tree reads like a story in search of a plot. Shannon creates a world both strange and familiar, basing her cultures upon recognizable real-world regions and times– Inys reads like a blend of the sixteenth-century English courts of Queen Mary I and her more politically astute younger half-sister, Elizabeth I, while Seiiki reads like feudal Japan. The Priory of the Orange Tree is a sprawling work, both in its global scale and in its propensity for stumbling about. The conflicting cultures must try to set aside their differences and defeat the oncoming darkness or face the end of the world as they know it. As the wyrms begin to wake from their long sleep, chaos spreads across the lands. Meanwhile, far across the ocean to the east, young Tané has trained all her life to become one of the prestigious dragon-riding warriors of Seiiki, but an impetuous decision one night puts all that she has worked for into jeopardy. She is protected from assassins by Ead Duryan, one of Sabran’s ladies-in-waiting who comes from a faraway land at the behest of the Priory of the Orange Tree, a mystical monastery where young women are trained to protect the world by slaying the fire-breathing wyrms. In the glittering court of Inys, Queen Sabran the Ninth must marry and bear a daughter to keep her country intact and prevent the rising of the Nameless One, a beast who will cover all the world in fire and darkness.

In her first standalone fantasy novel, best-selling author Samantha Shannon takes a stab at creating something epic with her tale of clashing cultures, dragons, and a thousand-year-old prophecy coming to fruition. If a book’s opening epigraph takes a quote from the biblical Book of Revelations, what follows had best be epic. Published February 26, 2019, by Bloomsbury Press

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