The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

Winner of the BSFA award for Best Novel in 2015.
Winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel in 2015.

A superb murder mystery, on an epic scale, set against the fall out - literally - of a war in Heaven.

Paris has survived the Great Houses War - just. Its streets are lined with haunted ruins, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine runs black with ashes and rubble. Yet life continues among the wreckage. The citizens continue to live, love, fight and survive in their war-torn city, and The Great Houses still vie for dominion over the once grand capital.

House Silverspires, previously the leader of those power games, lies in disarray. Its magic is ailing; its founder, Morningstar, has been missing for decades; and now something from the shadows stalks its people inside their very own walls.

Within the House, three very different people must come together: a naive but powerful Fallen, a alchemist with a self-destructive addiction, and a resentful young man wielding spells from the Far East. They may be Silverspires' salvation. They may be the architects of its last, irreversible fall...

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