Scottish author Struan Murray made a splash in 2021 when he won the U.K.’s Branford Boase Award for his debut novel, Orphans of the Tide, about a group of courageous kids battling an overwhelming evil in a watery world. His new series Dragonborn, originally scheduled to launch in spring 2026, is now scheduled for an October release from Dutton. The series was acquired by Dutton president and publisher Julie Strauss-Gabel, who describes it as “artfully crafted from magic, maps, and mythology, then expertly woven through with the heart and humor, messiness and warmth, that transform a story into a whole world.” The book’s strong in-house buzz was a factor in its early release, according to the publisher.
Dragonborn centers on nearly-12-year-old Alex Evans, who Strauss-Gabel describes as “struggling to figure out who she is. Is she a quiet, compliant daughter? Or is she fiercely independent, burning to break free?” At this crucial time in her life, Alex discovers she has a dragon inside her, and to her surprise, she’s not alone in this: there are others with this secret gift. She soon finds herself traveling to the island of Skralla, one of the few places on Earth where dragons still roam free, and she enrolls in a school that trains young dragons. Her fellow students are all wrestling with their inner dragons as well, seemingly to Alex, more skillfully than she is. It’s up to her to hone her stills and unlock her inner powers to battle the rising threat of Drak Midna, the greatest dragon of all, who wants to wage war with the human world.
Murray said inspiration for the story came from a chance encounter in Oxford, where he is a lecturer. “While queuing for an ice cream cone one sunny day, I got chatting to an eccentric, immaculately dressed man standing in front of me, who looked somehow halfway between George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien. He said that he was a scholar who specialized in the study of dragons, then told me all sorts of things about them I’d never heard. What struck me most was the way he talked about them, almost as if they were not mythical at all, but real. This got me thinking: what if dragons exist, but have found a cunning way to hide themselves? And what if some of them have hidden so well, and for so long, that they have forgotten who they are. And what if someone started waking them up again?”
While dragon stories are as old as time, Strauss-Gabel said that Dragonborn delivers the “action, mythology, and worldbuilding readers crave.” Murray said he was influenced by Celtic and British mythology as he created the world of Dragonborn as well as the phantom island of Hy-Brasil, which was depicted on maps for centuries off the coast of Ireland, but has never been located. Murray said the story offers an important distinction. Dragons “are not monsters to be fought, or steeds to be ridden by our heroes—they are the heroes,” he said. They can take human form and have human characteristics. They are also “creatures of opposites: horrifying yet awe-inspiring, greedy yet noble, destructive yet wise. I wanted the dragons of my story to be all these things at once, and to take these tales and find a way to fit them in the world I was building. For example, the dragon-children of Skralla sleep surrounded by their ‘treasures’—piles of sentimental keepsakes that they keep adding to across their lives.”
Dragonborn has an initial print run of 150,000 copies in the U.S., and features a patterned edge, foil accents, full-color endpapers, and an interior map. Strauss-Gabel said that readers can expect at least one more adventure in the series, due out in 2026. Dragons have been soaring to great success in recent years with series starters such as Skandar and the Unicorn Thief by A.F. Steadman (Simon & Schuster) and Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell (Knopf). Both books have been bestsellers.
Murray says he hopes young readers of the book will “imagine that dragons might be all around them, and that, just maybe, they might be a dragon, too.” To become one’s own “true, fearless self,” like Alex, readers must “embrace this inner fire, he added. The first volume of the series will end with “high stakes and much more story to come,” Strauss-Gabel said.
