Up until a few months ago, the plan was for the Locked Tomb series to be three volumes, with the third volume to be called Alecto the Ninth. See that dog posing cutely on the cover behind Nona? Muir assures us that the dog lives! But we won’t know until September if the rest of our faves are so lucky. Our conversation, which you can read in full below, covered Nona’s surprisingly chill vibe, what it’s like to turn your trilogy into a quartet halfway through, and why Nona is living in a different genre from Gideon and Harrow. To find out more about what lies in store for us with Nona, I spoke with Tamsyn Muir via email. It’s called Nona the Ninth, out September 13, and we here at Vox have the exclusive cover reveal. The Locked Tomb series was originally supposed to be a trilogy, but a few months ago, Muir and her publisher Tor announced that it would instead be a quartet, and there would be a new volume in store for fans. It’s a rich, luxurious set of books about the fraught power dynamics of intimate relationships, the way childhood trauma reshapes our brains, and, well, lesbian necromancers in space. Starting with 2019’s Gideon the Ninth and continuing on with 2020’s Harrow the Ninth, the Locked Tomb series has become one part space opera, one part genre deconstruction, and one part searing exploration of grief. Look, I’m a simple soul: You send me a book with the logline “ lesbian necromancers in space,” I’m not not going to get excited.

While we at Vox like to maintain a scholarly distance from much of today’s culture, I make an exception for Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series.

Gideon the ninth tor