In the East, a young woman named Dumai lives on a vast mountain peak and trains as a godsinger, a human with a unique connection to the dragons her people worship but who have slept for centuries. (Each Berethnet queen famously only births a single daughter.) Despite her desire to make her own choices, her body is not her own-and she is facing mounting pressure to wed and continue the line of succession.
In the West, teenage princess Glorian Berethnet is heir to the queendom of Inys, and has been raised to believe the existence of her family line is the literal chain that holds a monstrous wrym known as the Nameless One in check beneath the earth.
Literally spread across the four corners of the world - the four cardinal directions alert you to what area of the map you’re entering at the top of each chapter-the story is encompass nearly a half dozen main characters whose journeys all inevitably connect (though many of them will never physically meet). And there are moments where the scope and heft of that story feel like nothing so much as a work of art, grounding sweeping, apocalyptic events in emotional, deeply human stories of connection, love, and agency. These texts dance around and echo through one another in ways both large and small, using the strength of Shannon’s immense and immersive worldbuilding to tell a story that spans both kingdoms and generations. (The stories that play out in this book have long passed into legend by the time those living in the other are born.) You can even read this second installment in Shannon’s newly named Roots of Chaos series without ever having read its sister novel, but despite the almost two thousand pages spread between them, I don’t recommend it. It is a standalone prequel, set centuries before the events that take place in the previous book. Technically, her latest novel, titled A Day of Fallen Night isn’t a sequel or a continuation of the story we read in Priory. In fact, the only possible complaint about the book is that it was a standalone story, which meant that readers had to say goodbye to the intensely detailed, fascinating world that Shannon’s book built on its final page. A massive, old-school thousand-page epic about dragons and magic and secret sisterhoods of powerful sorceresses, Priory is female-focused fantasy at its absolute best.
Though fantasy author Samantha Shannon may be best known for her sprawling dystopian Bone Season series-which, by the way, is excellent!-with its spunky heroine, deadly otherworldly beings from another dimension, and agonizingly slow-burn central romance, but it was the release of her The Priory of the Orange Tree that fully established her as a writer that could literally do anything in the world of fantasy.
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