I will be the first to admit that I gave up on the high fantasy genre at around the same time I was tasked with reading The Hobbit in school. It would take me another decade to work out that there was fantasy outside of Tolkien – a genre full of authors with big, fantastical, diverse worlds that matched our own big, fantastical, diverse world.

And thank god somebody shoved this absolute forest of a book in my hands, because Samantha Shannon is one of these authors.

After centuries of relative peace the world of Inys is facing a threat it hasn’t seen the likes of for a millennium. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction – but assassins are closing in. To the East and the West, royal families, religious groups, and secretive societies are preparing for the unpreparable, and pressure of an impending doom forces prejudice, bigotry and wilful ignorance to the surface.

With a dragon’s lair in ‘the womb’ of the earth, proud royal families of colour and characters who fall in love with who they please, this book bucks the idea that our straight white world has any place in our fantasy.

What is also so refreshing about Shannon’s epic fantasy is that the characters and conflicts are not just shallow analogies for real-world problems. Shannon creates believable, complex, and intricate global conflicts which are both true to our real-world experience, and at the same time not reliant upon metaphorical associations.

Priory of the Orange Tree is a modern classic in the making. The characters are rich, the world is inviting and, to be honest, I’m still on the last chapter, because I really don’t want to leave this story behind.

Reviewed by Nikita Jones