A Deadly Education

A Deadly Education opens the Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik, published by Del Rey on 29 September 2020. Its narrator is Galadriel 'El' Higgins, who is half Welsh and half Indian, and she gives her own account of her third year at a school of magic that draws loosely on the legend of the Scholomance. It is the first of three books and it ends before the class graduates.

The Scholomance has no teachers and no holidays, and it sits in the Void, connected to the outside world only at the graduation gates. Students arrive at fourteen and have no contact with home until they leave. The maleficaria that feed on magic-users hunt the young, and ninety-five per cent of magic children are expected never to reach adulthood, which is the arithmetic the whole institution is built around and the reason the school's politics are so lethal.

El's affinity is for destruction, and a prophecy made before her birth says she will become a maleficer who pulls down the enclaves. Her great-great-grandmother was the seer who made it, and the family has treated the child accordingly ever since. El would rather simply graduate, which requires allies, and she is bad at being pleasant to the people she needs, and her plan for surviving the year depends on them anyway.

Orion Lake, the school's celebrated monster-killer, will not leave her alone, and his attention makes her both safer and more conspicuous. The trilogy continues in The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclaves, and the first volume establishes the school, its rules and the enclaves that most of the students are trying to earn a place in, which is the ambition that drives most of the school's social order.