Critics raving about her first novel, The Bone Season, are dubbing author Samantha Shannon the next J.K. Rowling of literature.
At only 21-years-old, the new comer has set high hopes for literary enthusiasts and publishers alike, who believe the author is capable of creating a seven-book series like Harry Potter.
"We've put all our trans-Atlantic resources behind The Bone Season," Nancy Miller, editorial director of Bloomsbury USA, told USA Today.
"This is not typical in any way," Miller said, "but Samantha has created something totally unique and completely her own with The Bone Season - a dazzling, brilliantly written post-apocalyptic page-turner with a strong female protagonist set in a fully conceived parallel world."
According to USA Today, The Bone Season is about 19-year-old Paige Mahoney living in the year 2059. Paige is a "talented clairvoyant whose allegiance to a criminal gang in the totalitarian-like state of Scion leads her down a dark path from which it is difficult to return":
Shannon has called this world a "retro-futuristic" environment, home to fading Victoriana and tech-savvy oxygen bars, and the book invokes both the political tyranny of George Orwell and the bucolic mythmaking of J.R.R. Tolkien...The Bone Season is being published in 21 countries, and film rights have been optioned by Andy Serkis' Imaginarium studios. Serkis is known to many as Gollum from the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies.
In a recent interview with BBC, Shannon talked about being from west London and how her novel has a strong feel of real places:
"The Bone Season is urban fantasy. It's not a high fantasy where you're inventing a whole new land. It's strongly rooted in real places.
"People think I didn't enjoy myself at Oxford because I turned it into this horrible, crumbling prison city... but it's a very claustrophobic city, I found.
"It's very tightly built around the university and when you're there you almost forget there's a world outside it.
"I've been interested in Oxford as a setting ever since I got my interviews there but it was only when I got the idea for the clairvoyants that I thought it would be a great idea to have people sent there."
The Bone Season was released to stores on Tuesday.
