First published 2018
Nona Grey is eight years old and covered in blood when she arrives at the Convent of Sweet Mercy. She has been falsely accused of murder. The truth is more complicated than that. Sweet Mercy is not an ordinary convent. The nuns here train girls to fight, to move through shadow, and to kill. A full education takes ten years. The sisters who teach blade and fist are among the most dangerous people on the planet Abeth, and they know it. What they do not know is what they have taken in with Nona. She carries old blood, the kind of inherited talent that surfaced in the ancient tribes who first came to Abeth by ship. Those gifts are rare now. In Nona they run deep. The central tension is not simply whether Nona survives her training. It is what she is being shaped into, and whether the convent that saved her life can contain what she is becoming. Mark Lawrence builds a world of ice and dying light around a girl who was, by her own account, born for killing. The emotional core is Nona herself: fierce, loyal, and already guilty of things no child should carry.
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, action, young-adult, dark-fantasy, epic-fantasy
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, emotionally-complex, fast-paced, gritty, intense
Tropes: chosen-one, coming-of-age, found-family, hidden-powers
Setting: Abeth, Convent of Sweet Mercy
499 pages · Paperback · Voyager GB
Content warnings: child-abuse, murder, violence