The Mime Order

by Samantha Shannon

  To Hattie Adam-Smith and Eleanor Weil at Think Jam—thank you for your incredible enthusiasm for all things Bone Season.

  The beautiful maps at the front of The Mime Order were drawn by Emily Faccini, and the cover was designed by the ever-brilliant David Mann. Thank you both for making this book so beautiful.

  Thank you to the fantastic team at the Imaginarium Studios—Will Tennant, Chloe Sizer, Andy Serkis, Jonathan Cavendish, and Catherine Slater—for your continued passion for the Bone Season series. Will and Chloe, an especially big thanks to you for being such dedicated and responsive readers.

  Thank you to my publishers, editors, and translators around the world for getting The Bone Season and The Mime Order to so many readers. A particularly big thank you to Ioana Schiau and Miruna Meirosu at Curtea Veche for introducing me to the music of Maria Tănase.

  Thank you to Alana Kerr for being such a wonderful Paige for the audiobooks.

  I’m very grateful to Sara Bergmark Elfgren, Ciarán Collins, and Maria Naydenova for letting me pester them with questions about languages, and to Melissa Harrison for her help with the starling part.

  Thank you to my friends for continuing to put up with the long absences from the real world—most of all to Ilana Fernandes-Lassman, Victoria Morrish, Leiana Leatutufu, and Claire Donnelly, who have been my rocks this year. I never thought I’d be lucky enough to find friends like you.

  And lastly, thank you to my family for your love, support, and hours of laughter. I couldn’t have started this journey without you.

  A Note on the Author

  Samantha Shannon was born in West London in 1991. She started writing at the age of fifteen. Between 2010 and 2013 she studied English language and literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. In 2013 she published The Bone Season, the first in a seven-book series. The Bone Season was a New York Times, a Sunday Times, and an Asian Age bestseller, was picked as a Book of the Year by the Daily Mail, Stylist, and Huffington Post, and was named one of Amazon’s 2013 Best Books of the Year. It has been translated into twenty-eight languages and the film rights have been acquired by the Imaginarium Studios and 20th Century Fox. The Mime Order is her second novel.

  @say_shannon

  facebook.com/theboneseason

  www.sshannonauthor.tumblr.com

  www.samanthashannon.co.uk

  By the Same Author

  The Bone Season

  Copyright © 2015 by Samantha Shannon-Jones

  Maps and illustrations copyright © 2015 by Emily Faccini

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  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.

  eISBN: 978-1-62040-894-0

  First published in the United States in 2015

  This electronic edition published in January 2015

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