Samantha Shannon Books in Order

If you want a fast paced dystopian series: The Bone Season → The Mime Order → The Song Rising
If you prefer to read the Bone Season novellas too: The Pale Dreamer → The Bone Season → The Mime Order → The Song Rising
If you want to catch up before the latest Bone Season novels: The Song Rising → The Dawn Chorus → The Mask Falling → The Dark Mirror
If you love sweeping dragon epics: The Priory of the Orange Tree → A Day of Fallen Night
If you want to read Roots of Chaos in timeline order: Among the Burning Flowers → A Day of Fallen Night → The Priory of the Orange Tree

Samantha Shannon is a British fantasy writer known for building big, intricate worlds and then finding the human stories inside them. Her work ranges from the near-future dystopia of The Bone Season to the dragon-filled epics of her Roots of Chaos cycle. Across both, she is drawn to questions of power, belief, and who gets to survive in a broken system.

She was born in Hammersmith in 1991 and grew up in Ruislip in west London, a bookish kid who was rarely without a novel in her bag. As a teenager she began writing seriously, spending long evenings at her desk instead of going out. At fifteen she completed her first novel, a fantasy called Aurora, which never saw print but taught her how much she loved the work of building a story from scratch. Even early on she had an eye on publishing, sending the book to agents and learning to live with rejection letters.

That early failure pushed her to study the craft, intern at a literary agency, and see from the inside how manuscripts move through the slush pile.

Shannon went on to study English Language and Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford, from 2010 to 2013. Between lectures and essays she began drafting what became The Bone Season, imagining how a clairvoyant underground might operate under an authoritarian government. In 2012 she signed a multi-book deal with Bloomsbury while she was still a student, and her debut was published the following year when she was twenty one. The success of that first book, and a screen adaptation in development, turned a private project into the foundation for a seven book series.

The Bone Season novels follow Paige Mahoney, a rare dreamwalker who works for a criminal syndicate in a future London where clairvoyance is outlawed. Over time the series widens into a story about revolution, found family, and the cost of resistance, moving from the prison colony of Oxford to the streets of Paris, Venice, and beyond. Alongside the main novels she has written novellas and companion pieces that deepen the mythology and show quieter moments between the battles. Readers tend to come for the high stakes and stay for the layered politics, invented argot, and slow burn relationships.

After establishing herself with The Bone Season, Shannon turned to secondary world fantasy with The Priory of the Orange Tree in 2019. Set in a universe divided by faith, dragons, and ancient history, it reimagines dragon slayer legends around a queendom under threat and the hidden order sworn to protect it. She later returned to that world with A Day of Fallen Night, a sweeping prequel that traces an earlier age of catastrophe, and Among the Burning Flowers, which explores the fall of the kingdom of Yscalin and the people caught in the first sparks of draconic war.

Together, these books have helped define her reputation for big-canvas, queer-inclusive fantasy that still feels intimate on the level of character.

Shannon has spoken about drawing inspiration from poets like John Donne, dystopian classics such as The Handmaid's Tale, and the linguistic inventiveness of authors like Anthony Burgess. Those interests filter into her own work through careful attention to language, invented slang, and the way stories get told and retold inside her worlds. She often centers queer characters and relationships, and has described herself as sapphic, but treats this as an ordinary part of the setting rather than a twist. Themes of oppression, resistance, chosen family, and the reshaping of old myths run through both her major series.

She now lives in London, where she continues to write new instalments in The Bone Season and The Roots of Chaos. In interviews and essays she is candid about revision, burnout, and the realities of a long running series, which has made her a reassuring voice for many younger writers and readers. Whether she is sending Paige Mahoney back into the fight or charting the next upheaval in her dragon filled world, her focus stays on the characters trying to carve out a future inside the systems they inherit.