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"If we are to look to the future, we must first remember the past."
— Gomeisa Sargas
The Bone Season is a 2023 rewrite of Samantha Shannon's 2013 debut novel, The Bone Season, the first in a seven-book series. Set in a Dystopian, Alternate History England, the story follows a young clairvoyant woman named Paige Mahoney. Since 1859, when the phenomenon of clairvoyance first became public knowledge, England has operated under an oppressive and strongly anti-voyant government called Scion. Paige belongs to a class of criminal voyants who use their contact with spirits and the spirit world (known as the æther) to make a living while avoiding the authorities. She is a rare kind of voyant known as a dreamwalker, capable of separating her spirit from her physical body and entering the æther in spirit form.
One night, Paige is subjected to a spot check by government agents and accidentally kills one with her gift. She is arrested that very night and transported to a secret penal colony run by a race of supernatural creatures known as Rephaim, who have been controlling Scion from the shadows for two hundred years and whose aim is to colonize the human world. Every ten years, a number of captive voyants like Paige are sent to the penal colony to be trained and indoctrinated. These decadal harvests are known as Bone Seasons.
This significantly revised edition of The Bone Season has been accorded its own individual page for a few reasons. First and foremost, it seems to be a do-over for the author, who has expressed many times on social media that she wishes she'd waited a few years before publishing her debut novel in order to be able to properly bring it to fruition. Having been written and published after four instalments, it might more accurately reflect her present vision for the series. Secondly, readers may find it helpful to check which tropes have been added to or cut from the 2013 edition page, as these will reflect information that the author has decided to retroactively give or withhold.
Please note that not all spoilers below are marked.
If you're looking for the sequels, please select one of the following:
To return to the general page for the Bone Season series, click here.
For character-specific tropes, please go to the character page for this series.
You may also wish to take a gander at The Bone Season (Original Flavour).
This book contains examples of:
- Accidental Murder: During the spot check that sets off the rest of the story, Paige is so terrified of being detained that she lashes out with her spirit, killing one Underguard and driving the other out of his mind.
- Adaptation Expansion: The 10th anniversary edition as a whole can be considered one; it reflects a significant change in the author's style and makes a number of changes to the 2013 original, including but not limited to:
- Paige acts far less out of blind, hotheaded pride; as such, her behaviour is much more rational. When she's not mouthing off at the Rephaim, that is.
- Liss is given more screentime, so to speak, and thus a more well-rounded characterization.
- Magdalen's night porter is given a name, Gail, and a more sympathetic role to play in Paige's environment.
- Nick doesn't shoot Paige in Trafalgar Square — he stabs her.
- We learn a little of how the harlies manage to survive without sufficient food, shelter or hygiene facilities (which in the 2013 edition would have stretched credulity): they forage, fish and do their laundry in the nearby rivers, all with scavenged or improvised equipment.
- The events of the book take place over the course of several months instead of being cramped into the space of a few weeks, which gives Paige more time to interact with the inhabitants of Sheol I and to develop her gift without giving herself permanent brain damage. They are also rearranged into a different order, with several significant conversations taking place before or after the events that catalyzed them in the original.
- A number of logical inconsistencies are explained (such as why Bone Season XX brought in so few humans when clearly hundreds of people are needed to run the city) or corrected (red-jackets now become performers only after earning the yellow tunic three times, rather than twice and both times permanently, which would have severely depleted Sheol I's reserve of high-ranking soldiers over the course of a decade).
- The Vampiric Draining scene from the first book is omitted entirely, as is the red-jacket's attempted sexual assault and any reference to Scarlett Burnish being called "Weaver's whore." The latter two have been described by the author on social media as something of a symptom of her early inexperience; namely, the assumption that any fantasy world must by default comprise misogyny.
- After revisiting her worst memory, Paige states (in direct contradiction of the original) that she was not in love with Nick.
- Much more attention is paid to Paige's Irish heritage, and Scion's attempted suppression thereof.
- After Action Patch Up: Paige does this twice to Warden after he returns from his forbidden altercations with the Emim, though not because she gives a damn if he lives. On the first occasion, he's unconscious, and she seriously considers finishing him off herself before coming to the grim realization that his death would only worsen her situation. On the second occasion, he's awake and coherent enough to instruct her on how to treat his wounds. She only grudgingly complies.
- The Big Damn Kiss: The unresolved tension between Paige and the Warden culminates in one of these near the end of the book, moments before she's marched up to the stage for public execution.
- Bitch Slap: Nashira does this to Warden when she visits the Founders Tower before the Bicentenary, apparently for the insolence of addressing her by name. Paige, watching from inside the linen closet, is appalled.
- BFS: The instrument of Paige's botched onstage execution at the Bicentenary, a greatsword called the Inquisitor's Justice.
- Boring Insult: After patching him up for the second time, Paige tells Liss and Julian that Warden hasn't spoken to her in a while. When Liss asks her if something happened, Paige says, "No, he's just a dryshite," this being an insulting term for a boring person in Ireland.
- Bridal Carry: Warden does this to Paige no less than three times over the course of the book: after their first training session in Port Meadow (justified, as she's so exhausted she can barely stand); after she possesses the butterfly (again, to expediate their return to Sheol I); and after Nick stabs her in the gut in London.
- Creepy Souvenir: The death masks with which Nashira decorates her walls, presumably moulded from the faces of the voyants she has murdered.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: If Paige had just waited for Nick to drive her home, she never would have been arrested.
- David Versus Goliath: Paige facing Nashira in the climax. Nashira is a powerful Rephaite with not one but several clairvoyant abilities, as well as her fallen angels to serve as weapon and shield, while Paige is a human woman whose only assets are her rare gift and the element of surprise.
- Design Student's Orgasm: The cover is far more elaborate than that of the classic edition. The top semicircle portrays the dreaming spires of Oxford, most prominently the Radcliffe Camera, while the left and right sides represent Paige and Warden respectively: Seven Dials and the Founders Tower, together with poppies and salvia, the sage of the diviners.
- Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Paige says this almost verbatim after showing Warden her most painful memory.
- Fantastic Ghetto: The Rookery, where the harlies are forced to live in squalor: starved, beaten and fed upon by the higher castes of the penal colony.
- Foreseeing My Death: Liss suffers a fatal fall when Gomeisa cuts the silks she was hanging onto in the Guildhall. In her dying moments, she tells Paige that she foresaw this a few weeks prior, when she did a reading for herself and drew the Tower, which depicts two people toppling to their deaths.
- Heartfelt Apology: Warden gives Paige one of these after confessing to her about the third pill — in writing, probably having guessed that she wouldn't hear him out otherwise. The letter he leaves her is longer and more intimate than its counterpart in the 2013 edition, almost ardent by Rephaite standards.
- Held Gaze: Paige catches a Rephaite studying her at the oration, and holds his gaze for an intense, charged moment before remembering that she's forbidden to look him in the eye. Once he becomes her keeper, they start doing this on a regular basis.
- If I Can't Have You…: A non-romantic example. Jaxon Hall is extremely possessive of his gang — or, rather, their rare and prestigious gifts. So when his only dreamwalker tells him that she's quitting the Seven Seals, he threatens to make her a pariah in the syndicate using this exact formula.
- I'm Not Hungry: Paige does this twice over the course of her imprisonment: first out of pride, when Suhail drags her back to Magdalen and Warden asks her if she's hungry, and then out of pique, when Michael brings her breakfast after Warden admits to having seen her memories.
- In-Universe Catharsis: Warden asks Paige to show him her last, most painful memory, so that she can confront it and be free of it. Whether or not it worked is left ambiguous, but she's no longer pining after Nick by the time The Mime Order rolls around.
- I Shall Taunt You: Warden does this to Paige when they train on the meadow, trying to goad her into attacking his dreamscape.
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: Used by a few of the Rephaim, just to prove what assholes they are.
- Thuban refers to Paige as "it" when questioning Warden about her, demonstrating his especially contemptuous view of human worth: about on par with animals, if not lower. Warden presents an immediate contrast by answering with "she."
- Used also by Kraz Sargas when he finds Paige in the House."So [Arcturus] lets his tenant go wandering off by itself."
- Lima Syndrome: Warden's treatment of Paige is singularly humane and considerate, which seems incongruous until we learn that he's a dissident of the Sargas regime and unsympathetic toward the violent colonization of Sheol I. He always intended to make an ally of her, should she prove trustworthy. But by looking through her memories to determine whether or not she's likely to betray him, he comes to empathize with Paige on a deeply personal level and eventually to desire more than alliance from her.
- Medal of Dishonor: Paige is less than pleased to be made a pink-jacket; under ordinary circumstances, she would have been promoted only if she'd turned someone in or otherwise proved her loyalty to her new masters, and because of this Liss and the other performers react to her with hostility upon first sight.
- Moment Killer: Nashira walks in on Paige and Warden embracing during the Bicentenary celebrations. She doesn't react well.
- Neck Snap: Nashira does this to Seb during Paige's first test, proving yet again that human life is expendable to the Rephaim.
- No-Sell: When Warden taunts her in Port Meadow during their first training session, Paige attempts to physically attack him by driving her shoulder into his abdomen. Given his size, nothing happens. She rebounds off of him as though off a statue.
- Oh, Wait!: In Paige's final memory, when Jaxon orders her to "break into" Zeke's dreamscape, she protests that she doesn't do break-ins. He responds, "You don't do them. I see. I didn't realize you had a job description. Oh! Now I remember — I didn't give you one."
- Penal Colony: The plot revolves around Sheol I, a penal colony established by the Rephaim with the purpose of training, indoctrinating and subjugating human clairvoyants. Those who fail their tests are forced to live in squalor in the Rookery, starved and beaten by anyone with higher status, while those who succeed in their tests are made to fight the corpselike monsters who freely roam the land around Oxford. Also qualifies as Black Site and Extranormal Prison.
- Protest Song: "Molly Malone," a traditional Irish folk song set in Dublin, has in-universe come to be associated with the Molly Riots and the Irish resistance. When Paige is brought onstage to be executed at the Bicentenary, her allies in the crowd below — mostly amaurotics and performers — sing this song to pay homage to her. A few of them later pay for it with their lives.
- Rousing Speech: Paige delivers one to her fellow escapees on Port Meadow, encouraging them to fight off the approaching Vigiles while she deals with the poltergeist guarding the entrance to the train.
- Saved to Enslave: Nashira tells all the new white-jackets that by bringing them to Sheol I, the Rephaim have spared them from the fate that Scion would have otherwise chosen for them: hanging or nitrogen asphyxiation.
- Talking Is a Free Action: Paige gives the above-mentioned Rousing Speech even as a horde of gun-wielding Vigiles bear down on her and her fellow escapees. Given that they would have been well within shooting range as soon as they came into sight, and that it takes a lot more time to give a speech than for a group of trained soldiers to run fifty yards, it's convenient that the carnage didn't begin until after she was done.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: Michael slips a little something into the red-jackets' soup at the autumn feast to make sure they won't be at top performance during the Bicentenary.
- This Way to Certain Death: When Paige is dropped off in the woods for her second test, she disobeys orders and heads south through No Man's Land. Then she stumbles on a crater and a mutilated skeleton. Faced with proof that there really is a minefield, she reluctantly turns back toward Sheol I.
- Visual Pun: Jaxon to Nadine, blowing cigar fumes into her face: "I wonder how long it will take the NVD to ... smoke you out?"
- We Are Everywhere: Paige says this verbatim at the beginning of the book, telling the reader that clairvoyants are out there whether we can see them or not.
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