Nona the Ninth

Nona the Ninth is a novel by the New Zealand writer Tamsyn Muir, published in 2022. It is the third book in The Locked Tomb series, after Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, and Alecto the Ninth was announced to follow.

The series is set in a solar system ruled by necromancers organised into nine houses, and the first two novels were concerned with a competition and with a war among them. This one moves to a besieged city on a planet where a vast blue sphere sits on the horizon and a faction called Blood of Eden waits for the Emperor Undying's forces. Nona is a young woman sharing a household, working at a school and interested in ordinary things, and she is also six months old in the body she is using, since she woke up in it as someone else. Muir writes the book through Nona's own limited understanding, so the history of the series arrives in pieces, and the question of whose body she has and what her friends want with it is the engine of the plot.

The novel was a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo and Locus awards and won the Premio Ignotus for best foreign novel in 2023.