Nona the Ninth

"Nona the Ninth is the third in Muir’s Locked Tomb series. Every installment so far has been nominated for a Hugo. Muir’s richly imaginative writing defies easy categorisation: of Gideon the Ninth, the Chicago Review of Books declared that “part of the delight of reading the novel is just how fearlessly it tosses together outlandish ideas with distinct elements from different genres. It’s a space opera about wizards; it shapes itself into cozy mystery ; it slides into slasher-horror, then cuts its way free with musketeer-level swashbucklery.” In Nona the Ninth, Muir steps seamlessly into more civilian, homely concerns. “Nona” has the body of Harrow, the titular character of the second book, and is suspected of having the mind of either Harrow or Gideon. Whoever she is, she is now amnesiac, and has a childlike mind in her older body. Forces far greater than Nona want her to be a weapon: she wants to play with a six-legged dog called Noodle. Family arguments and school days mix with necromancers and zombies, and with the potentially planet-destroying stakes that quite literally loom overhead. The result, writes Paste Magazine , is that Muir’s ‘hilarious prose is full of dark subject matter… but tons of heart’. The terrifying stakes are part of child-like Nona’s normal world, and the close third-person voice relays them with a chilling innocence."