Shadow and Bone

Shadow and Bone is a young adult fantasy adventure and the debut novel of the American author Leigh Bardugo, published by Macmillan on 5 June 2012. It follows Alina Starkov, a teenage orphan growing up in the Russia-inspired country of Ravka.

Alina is a mapmaker with an ordinary record and a secret she does not know she is keeping. When her regiment tries to cross the Fold, the band of darkness that cuts Ravka in half, she produces a light that should be impossible, and she is taken to the capital to be trained as one of the Grisha, the country's magical elite. What looks like a rescue turns out to have conditions attached.

Bardugo built the world from Russian and eastern European material, and this first book sets out both the magic system and the political problem of the Fold. It was followed by two more novels and then by a duology set in the same world, and it is the book that established the setting for all of them.