Nona the Ninth
The Locked Tomb • Book 3
by Tamsyn Muir
Why You'll Love This
Nona just wants to pet dogs and have a birthday party — she also might be a world-ending weapon, and somehow both things feel equally urgent.
- Great if you want: a tender, strange character study inside an apocalyptic war story
- The experience: deceptively slow-burning — intimate and odd until it isn't
- The writing: Muir narrates through an unreliable innocent; the prose weaponizes sweetness
- Skip if: you haven't read books one and two — this will not make sense
About This Book
In a city under siege, with a monstrous blue sphere threatening to crack the planet open and rival forces massing at every border, the most pressing concern for Nona is whether she'll get a birthday party. That tension — between apocalyptic stakes and the fierce, ordinary joy of a girl who loves dogs and beach walks and the small family she's built — is exactly what makes this book impossible to put down. Nona woke up six months ago in a body that isn't hers, surrounded by people who need her to be something she doesn't yet understand, and the question of who she really is sits at the heart of everything.
Tamsyn Muir writes with a voice unlike anyone else working in genre fiction — strange and funny and suddenly, devastatingly tender. Where the earlier Locked Tomb books lean into Gothic horror and Byzantine mystery, this one is warmer, stranger, and more emotionally direct, told through the eyes of a narrator whose guileless perspective makes the world both funnier and more heartbreaking than it has any right to be. The prose rewards close attention while remaining compulsively readable, and the structural payoffs, when they arrive, land with real force.