Transcript of the letter below the cut.
Hello. It’s me, Tamsyn Muir. This box contains, among other things, a copy of my novel Nona the Ninth. It’s yours now. I don’t want it back.
Your next move will probably depend a little bit on whether you’ve read either of the previous novels in the series, Gideon the Ninth (which is about how a jock and nerd can never be friends) and Harrow the Ninth (which is about being a kid and suddenly realizing that your parents probably had sex.)
If you haven’t read either of those books, I’m going to level with you: you may want to try to read one of them first. I know, I know, but Nona the Ninth is the third book in a four-book set and the four books are basically telling one very long and complicated story. If you start with Nona you’re coming in at the one-hour mark in a two-hour movie. Nona is very different to the previous two books—it takes place somewhere we’ve never been before, and many of the characters, including the protagonist, are people we’ve never really met—but there is lots of stuff that is designed to make the reader go “Oh no, it’s her again!!” and that probably won’t work so well if you have no idea who she is.
If you have read either, or (worst case) both, of the other two books, you know damn well what you're getting into. There will be swords. There will be bones. People will be doing upsetting things with the bones. Ianthe will be there, somewhere.
All I will say is that Nona the Ninth was originally the first act of a different book. The last book in the Locked Tomb series, Alecto the Ninth, originally began with the story of Nona. Fore reasons practical and artistic, my editor and I came to the conclusion that Nona actually needed her own book. This caused a huge amount of upheaval and made everybody’s lives worse, including mine, but I think it was the right decision; hopefully, if you read this book, you’ll end up agreeing with me.
People often talk about all the meme references in the books. They ask me when I will use modern ones. They hope they will open Nona and see a reference to the horse Plinko. Truth is, I don’t go in deliberately thinking to use memes; my sense of humour is just so warped, and I laugh and laugh at things nobody else in the universe laughs at, that my referential machine gun is loaded with some very strange ammo. There is one conversation in the book between two people trying to cope with the responsibilities that loving each other has placed on them, and the fatuousness of having a weightless love. In the original form of this conversation, one person says: “It drives me mad to think that simply by being in your life, I have added to its weight.” The second person replies: “Then you should have lived in a broom cupboard.” That’s not in the book any more because I think I took it out even before my editor could’ve, but I remember kicking my little legs up and howling at broom cupboard for hours. The broom cupboard is just such a fine and private place to be, in my mind. I don’t even know why a broom cupboard bespeaks such isolation: Is it just the place where nobody goes? After all this time I still find the idead weirdly compelling—that at the end of the day, none of us are living in the broom cupboard. Love cannot find you in the broom cupboard.
Love does find most of the people in the book, or they take it, or they try to escape it—but not even the powers of death can defeat love. There’s another meme I could’ve used. You can’t catch me, love thoughts.
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