The Bone Season (2013)
The Bone Season is a 2013 young women book written by Samantha Shannon and Samnatha Shannon.
In a reimagined 2059, the Scion security state rules London and clairvoyance is a crime. Paige Mahoney works in the criminal underworld as a dreamwalker, one of the rarest and most dangerous kinds of voyant, able to slip into other minds. Samantha Shannon's world runs on a rigid hierarchy of psychic gifts and the fear that keeps it standing. When Paige is captured and handed to a hidden city ruled by an otherworldly race that harvests clairvoyants, she has to learn the rules of a place designed to break her. Dense worldbuilding, dystopian menace, hard-earned defiance.
Quick answers
What is The Bone Season about?
In a reimagined 2059, the Scion security state rules London and clairvoyance is a crime. Paige Mahoney works in the criminal underworld as a dreamwalker, one of the rarest and most dangerous kinds of voyant, able to slip into other minds. Samantha Shannon's world runs on a rigid hierarchy of psychic gifts and the fear that keeps it standing. When Paige is captured and handed to a hidden city ruled by an otherworldly race that harvests clairvoyants, she has to learn the rules of a place designed to break her. Dense worldbuilding, dystopian menace, hard-earned defiance.
When was The Bone Season published?
The Bone Season was published in 2013.
Who made The Bone Season?
The Bone Season was written by Samantha Shannon, Samnatha Shannon and Alana Kerr.
Similar books
A few thoughts on The Bone Season
Play Dishonored for the same oppressed city, forbidden supernatural gifts, and a lone operator moving through a regime built to crush her. BioShock shares the eerie sealed-off society running on its own cruel logic. For a heroine slowly turning captivity into resistance under a controlling power, The Handmaid's Tale carries the same airless dread and long, patient defiance.
States that make your very nature a crime
Paige can be arrested for what she is before she does anything at all, since Scion has already decided clairvoyance itself is the offense. The Handmaid's Tale runs on that same logic turned toward gender, An Ember in the Ashes and A Torch Against the Night criminalize scholarship and rebellion, and The Young Elites hunts down anyone whose body was marked by the blood fever.
Fantasy worlds that rank people by their gift
Scion sorts voyants into a strict hierarchy of rarity and danger, dreamwalkers at the very top, and that same instinct to rank magic runs through the Grisha orders in Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, and Ruin and Rising. Graceling and Fire treat a hidden Grace as something to be feared and controlled, and Three Dark Crowns splits its queens by gift before it ever asks who deserves the crown.
Hidden power surviving inside a surveillance city
Paige survives Scion London the way a Splicer survives Rapture or Corvo survives Dunwall, keeping a dangerous gift hidden inside a city built to control exactly that kind of power. Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom move criminals with buried Grisha abilities through a different watched city, and King of Scars keeps that same tension running at the very top of government.
Drafted into a power structure that only wants your gift
Paige is captured and handed over to a hidden city that values her only for her rarest gift, not for anything else about her. Children of Blood and Bone, Children of Virtue and Vengeance, and The Gilded Ones draft their heroines the same way, into armies or wars built around one useful power, and Iron Widow makes that draft literal: a girl weaponized and piloted like a machine.