The House of Shattered Wings
core novel 2015 Dominion of the Fallen
Record
| First published | 2015 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.39 (4,647 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| Page count | 402 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780451477385 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
The House of Shattered Wings is set in a Paris devastated decades earlier by a magical war among fallen angels, whose rival great Houses now hold what remains of the city between them, each ruled from an ostentatious, crumbling stronghold. House Silverspires, once the most powerful of these Houses, is in decline: its magic is failing, its enigmatic founder Morningstar has been missing for years, and a mysterious threat begins picking off its inhabitants from within. As the House's leadership struggles to hold things together, three very different figures -- a young, newly Fallen angel still learning the rules of this broken world, an alchemist wrestling with addiction, and a young man skilled in Annamese magic -- are drawn into investigating the danger, in what unfolds as a murder mystery set against the fallout of Heaven's own civil war.
Where it sits
- Universe: Dominion of the Fallen
- Series: The Dominion of the Fallen Trilogy core; position 1 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Aliette de Bodard
Awards (verified)
- British Science Fiction Association Award (Best Novel), 2015: won; Confirmed directly via bsfa.co.uk's own Past Winners page: "The 2015 Best Novel winner was The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard (Gollancz)" -- presented March 26, 2016 at Mancunicon (per Locus Online's contemporary announcement post). The BSFA labels its award by the eligible work's publication year, not the ceremony year; registered as 2015 to match the award body's own labeling.
- Locus Award (Best Fantasy Novel), 2016: finalist; 4th place per the no-cutoff Locus-poll convention. Confirmed via sfadb.com (the accepted primary source for Locus lineage claims).
Notes
- From the series record (The Dominion of the Fallen Trilogy): Fallen angels ruling magically-devastated, post-apocalyptic Paris through rival Houses, with a Vietnamese-inflected dragon kingdom under the Seine. Completed trilogy (2015-2019).
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Dominion of the Fallen Trilogy: position 1 of 3: next The House of Binding Thorns (2017)
Sources
- Aliette de Bodard: official bibliography
- Wikipedia: Aliette de Bodard
- BSFA, official past award winners
- sfadb: Aliette de Bodard
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