Fantasy books are all about escapism, and in order to transport the reader away from reality the best examples have vibrant, fully-realised worlds with complex, exciting structures and systems (be they magic, technology, religion and so on). With her first novel The Bone Season, Samantha Shannon shows that she’s a natural world builder, weaving together past, present and future England to create a compelling mixture of epic fantasy and dystopian future. Here we have a world of the near future, at once frozen in Victorian times and developed past today’s technology, populated with poltergeists, angels and monsters. Part of the population are ‘clairvoyants’ with cleverly realised abilities that are beyond the ken of others, and thus are shunned and persecuted for being different. Their whole world is built around the control of this social underclass, through segregation, propaganda and fear.
