The House of Shattered Wings
It is the beginning of the 21st Century, and Paris is a city of witches and alchemists; of warlocks and Fallen angels; where the colonies still feed an irrepressible appetite for novelty and distractions. The Great Magicians’ War has come and gone, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. The Grand Magasins are haunted ruins; Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine has turned black with ashes and rubble and the remnants of the spells that tore the city apart.
There is not much magic left, and what little there is resides in the Fallen. They are magic; made of raw, unadulterated power that they can pass on with nothing more than a breath or a touch.
Madeleine was once a powerful witch; but she now works as an alchemist for the House of Silverspires, transferring magic from Fallen to humans. She bottles elixirs that distil the breath of the Fallen into devastating weapons; and grinds the bones of dead Fallen into ‘angel dust’, a drug that grants magical powers to those who inhale it.
But Silverspires has become a dangerous place to dwell. There is something unwelcome in the House; something dark and powerful, something that has killed and will kill again...
Aliette de Bodard
Aliette de Bodard is a French-American speculative fiction writer. She is of French/Vietnamese descent, born in the USA, and grew up in Paris. French is her mother-tongue, but she writes in English. A graduate of École Polytechnique, she works as a software engineer specialising in image processing and is a member of the Written in Blood writers group.
She was a 2007 winner of Writers of the Future, and in 2009 was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She has been published in Interzone, Hub magazine, Black Static, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Apex Magazine, among others.
A Dominion of the Fallen
A Dominion of the Fallen consists of three primary books, and includes one additional book that complement the series but is not considered mandatory reads. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
Related series Dragons and Blades