Samantha Shannon is a British fantasy writer, born in Hammersmith in 1991 and Oxford-educated in English at St Anne's College — and you can feel the wide reading behind everything she builds. Her 2013 debut, The Bone Season, arrived to comparisons with J.K. Rowling and announced a writer happy to work on a very large canvas.
She writes across two worlds that could hardly be less alike. One is the near-future, dystopian Bone Season series, all clairvoyants and a hidden, penal Oxford ruled by an otherworldly race; the other is Roots of Chaos, the dragon-filled epic-fantasy universe of The Priory of the Orange Tree. Both run to large casts and richly built secondary worlds, and both tend to put a queer — often sapphic — romance at their very heart.
If you've come looking for the best place to start, or wondering what order to read her in, the short answer is that her two series are separate journeys — and one of them is a single, self-contained volume you can pick up with no commitment at all.
On our shelves
Slow BurnSapphic Dragons
The Priory of the Orange Tree
A doorstop of a book that earns every page: a queen without an heir, a secret mage guarding her, sea-spanning dragon-riders, and an ancient wyrm stirring underground. The sapphic slow-burn at its centre is worth the wait, and the world is the kind you can fully move into. Read it when you've a long quiet stretch and want to disappear for a week.
Where to start
Start with The Priory of the Orange Tree. It's a complete, self-contained epic between two covers — no series to commit to — and its warring dragons and slow-burn sapphic romance make it the warmest, most welcoming door into Shannon's work.
Samantha Shannon’s books
A standalone 800-page epic set in a world split over dragons — revered as gods in the East, feared as monsters in the West — with a hidden mage guarding a queen as an ancient draconic evil stirs. Shannon's feminist retelling of Saint George and the Dragon, anchored by a slow-burn sapphic romance, and the easiest way in.
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A standalone prequel set centuries earlier, as the fire-breathing wyrms wake. It follows four lives — three women and a young man from the North — through an age-defining catastrophe, and reads happily before or after Priory.
A shorter Roots of Chaos prequel — around 60,000 words — set just before Priory, as the wyrm Fyredel wakes and the nation of Yscalin falls. A princess, her betrothed prince and a lower-class wyrm-hunter carry it.
Her debut and the start of the Bone Season series. In a dystopian 2059, the clairvoyant Paige Mahoney is captured and taken to a hidden, penal version of Oxford ruled by an otherworldly race.
The second Bone Season novel, following Paige back into the criminal clairvoyant underworld of a near-future London.
The fifth Bone Season book, several instalments deep into the planned arc — for readers who've fallen in with Paige and want to keep going.
Good questions
She has two separate series. For Roots of Chaos (the dragon world) you can read in publication order — The Priory of the Orange Tree, then the prequels A Day of Fallen Night and Among the Burning Flowers — or in internal chronology, beginning with Among the Burning Flowers, then A Day of Fallen Night, then Priory; each volume is built to stand alone. The Bone Season is a continuous serial and is best read in publication order from The Bone Season onward.
It's a true standalone — a complete epic in a single volume — though it belongs to the wider Roots of Chaos world. You can read it entirely on its own, prequels or no prequels.
No. A Day of Fallen Night is a prequel set centuries earlier and is designed to be read before or after Priory. Most readers begin with Priory and treat it as their introduction.
Its central romance is a slow burn — sapphic, and built patiently across a very long book. Expect a gradual, tender arc rather than anything fast.
Her two most recent are both from 2025 — Among the Burning Flowers, a short Roots of Chaos prequel, and The Dark Mirror, the fifth Bone Season novel. The Bone Season serial is set to continue with The Moth Reborn, due in 2027.
If it was the dragons, the patient sapphic romance and the big, lived-in world you loved, our Warm Epics shelf is the place to wander next.
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