Nona the Ninth

Who Is Nona?

Nona does not know who she is. She woke up in a body that feels borrowed, with no memory of anything before the waking, and the people around her treat her with an intensity and care that she doesn’t understand and hasn’t questioned because she has been too busy being happy.

She loves dogs. She loves her flatmates. She loves school, where she teaches, and she loves the children she teaches, and she loves the afternoon sunlight and food and the specific pleasure of things being okay. She has six weeks, she is told. What happens at six weeks is not explained.

This is the beginning of Nona the Ninth, the third novel in Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, and it represents such a radical departure from the formal registers of the first two books that it disorients even readers who knew what Muir was capable of.

The Warmest Book in the Series

Gideon the Ninth is sardonic and gothic and funny in a sharp-edged way. Harrow the Ninth is grief-drenched and formally complex and emotionally devastating. Nona the Ninth is, in its first half, genuinely cozy.

Nona living her daily life in a city under siege — going to school, caring for a dog that follows her, watching the people she loves do important things she doesn’t fully understand, making friends, eating meals, experiencing joy in the uncomplicated way that only people without history can — is rendered with extraordinary warmth. Muir has always had comic gifts, but this novel reveals a gift for warmth that the earlier books didn’t require.

The comedy here is softer. Nona’s pleasure in dogs, her direct social manner, her genuine incapacity for the specific social calculations that the more experienced characters constantly perform — these generate a kind of delighted comedy that is completely different from Gideon’s sardonic humour.

What Nona Doesn’t Know

Readers of the first two books will understand things about Nona’s situation that she cannot. The novel deploys this in a way that is unusual: it doesn’t use the dramatic irony to create dread or tension so much as to create a kind of protective readerly tenderness toward Nona. She is happy, and the reader knows her happiness is complicated, and this combination produces an unusual emotional effect.

The revelation of what Nona actually is — what body she inhabits, what her six weeks mean, what the people around her are managing — is handled with extraordinary patience. Muir builds to it over the full length of the novel, using each element of Nona’s daily life to establish what she cares about and who she is before the context that complicates those things arrives.

The Apocalyptic Stakes

The world of Nona the Ninth is under active siege. The planet where the novel is set is being destroyed; the political and military situation is dire and getting worse. This material is present throughout the novel, but Muir keeps it at a slight distance from Nona’s immediate daily experience — not because it doesn’t matter but because Nona doesn’t fully understand it, and the novel is so close to her perspective that her understanding sets the reader’s.

The contrast between the domestic warmth of Nona’s life and the apocalyptic urgency of the background situation is the novel’s tonal experiment, and it succeeds.

Arriving at Alecto

Nona the Ninth ends in a position that leads directly into Alecto the Ninth (2024), the series’ final volume. The three central books function as a preparation for that resolution, and Nona specifically provides the emotional material that makes the finale land.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — The Locked Tomb’s warmest and most surprising entry. Nona is one of the most loveable protagonists in contemporary fantasy, and the cozy-apocalypse tonal experiment is a genuine achievement.