No such thing has ever happened in Ravka. When they enter the Fold, something very peculiar happens–when Mal is attacked by volcra and on the pair are on the verge of sure death, Alina unlocks an unforetold ability to summon light, and repel the monsters and the darkness. Mal and Alina find themselves on the battlefield aboard skiffs and enter the Fold–a region severing Ravka from other countries with its unpassable, monster-filled darkness.

Mal–the tracker–is young and handsome and carefree, renowned already throughout the ranks of his battalion as an uncannily good tracker and seducer of beautiful women (including Grisha), though he is Alina’s oldest and closest friend. Always a little sickly, always a bit frail and clumsy and graceless and awkward, Alina enlisted in Ravka’s First Army partially out of civic duty (and by enforced necessity), but more importantly to stay connected to her best friend and unrequited love, Mal. Stand alone or series: Book 1 in the Shadow and Bone trilogy, and part of the overall GrishaverseĪ mapmaker, a tracker, and an ageless power-wielder walk onto the field of battle, and nothing will ever be the same.Īlina Starkov–the mapmaker–has lived her entire life by keeping her head down. Shadow and Bone is the first installment in Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha Trilogy. With darkness looming and an entire kingdom depending on her untamed power, Alina will have to confront the secrets of the Grisha.

Yet nothing in this lavish world is what it seems. Wrenched from everything she knows, Alina is whisked away to the royal court to be trained as a member of the Grisha, the magical elite led by the mysterious Darkling. But when her regiment is attacked on the Fold and her best friend is brutally injured, Alina reveals a dormant power that saves his life-a power that could be the key to setting her war-ravaged country free. Now its fate may rest on the shoulders of one lonely refugee.Īlina Starkov has never been good at anything.

Surrounded by enemies, the once-great nation of Ravka has been torn in two by the Shadow Fold, a swath of near impenetrable darkness crawling with monsters who feast on human flesh.

The grisha books