Tunuva is consoled in her grief by her Sapphic relationship with Esbar, the future leader of the Priory. “She had a sudden urge to rip and strike, run and scream, fling open the doors and run until her legs gave in-anything to be out of this room, to not have heard these tidings. Dumai loses her childhood friend, Wulf sees his king murdered and Glorian must bear the death of her parents: “All sense of control crumbled,” Shannon writes. Tunuva is a mother without a child, who carries the loss as the kernel at the centre of her being. Shannon lost both her grandparents while writing A Day of Fallen Night, and grief informs the novel “a lot”-in an incredibly beautiful and honest way. Yet Shannon and her editors prevailed, managing to whittle the text down to a mere 295,000 words. While at an event in Edinburgh, Shannon was found on the final night of editing by her friend and fellow author Tasha Suri “in the hotel café, rocking back and forth with a huge espresso martini”. A compressed editing schedule-a result of the pandemic-added strain. Originally sent to her editors, Alexandra Pringle and Allegra Le Fanu, at 345,000 words, it was the longest piece of work Shannon had ever written. It is an epic read and one which was epic to produce, requiring a “heroic effort from Bloomsbury” and Shannon. It’s been empowering for me personally to write a world which is quite women-centric and where the male characters don’t disrespect women just for being women Dumai searches for a way to save her kingdom and Glorian grapples with her duty, while Wulf fights desperately to protect her and his king. In the south the Priory-a group of female warriors sworn to guard against such evil-are called to battle. An age of fire has begun: the Dreadmount volcano erupts with dragons and a fiery plague lays waste to the world. We follow Glorian, heir to the Inys throne Dumai, a devout princess of Seiiki Wulf, a soldier of Hróth with a hidden past and Tunuva, priestess and warrior of the Priory.
Set 500 years before the events in The Priory of the Orange Tree, Shannon charts the devastating events of four years, in four countries, through four principle narrators. It is the prequel to The Priory of the Orange Tree and the second book in her Roots of Chaos cycle. Nightmarish soup aquatics aside, we spend the next couple of hours discussing A Day of Fallen Night, Shannon’s mighty “labour of love”. Shannon orders a latte-in need of caffeine after a detox gave her “really vivid nightmares”, including a clown forcing her to swim through a pan of tomato soup.
"I think A Day of Fallen Night is a slightly tougher book it’s more complicated, it’s longer and there’s more politics,” says Samantha Shannon over coffee when we meet in King’s Cross.
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