Sorcerer to the Crown

Sorcerer to the Crown is a fantasy novel by the British-Malaysian writer Zen Cho, published in 2015. It is set in a version of Regency England in which magic is a matter of state.

The Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers is one of the most respected organisations in England and has long been responsible for maintaining magic in the King's lands, but it has fallen into disgrace. It has named an unsuitable gentleman as its Sorcerer Royal: Zacharias Wythe is a freed slave with no familiar of his own, and the appointment has been received badly by the Society. At the same time England's previously plentiful supply of magic is slowly draining away, and the Society has never allowed women to practise a profession it regards as belonging to men. Zacharias is an accomplished magician as well as an unwanted figurehead, and he travels to the border of Fairyland in order to find out what has happened to the country's magic; on the way he meets a companion whose own interests turn out to be bound up with his.

Cho takes the conventions of the Regency novel and the magic academy and sets them in a British society that is also an empire, and this was her first novel.