Alexandra Christo Books in Order

If you want a dark fairy-tale starting point: To Kill a Kingdom → Princess of Souls
If you want a gritty crew fantasy: Into the Crooked Place → City of Spells
If you want monsters, curses, and a darker romance: The Night Hunt → Princess of Souls
If you want a quick tour of her range: To Kill a Kingdom → Into the Crooked Place → The Night Hunt

Alexandra Christo is a British fantasy author who writes sharp, dark stories about monsters, magic, and young people trying to choose their own lives. She studied Creative Writing at university and now lives in Hertfordshire. Her debut novel, To Kill a Kingdom, became an international bestseller and helped establish the mix of fairy-tale menace, fast plotting, and dry humor that runs through her work.

Books got to her early.

Christo has said her mother taught her to read and write before she started school, and that early start left her fascinated by words. For a long time, though, being an author felt like something other people did. The turning point came when she discovered she could actually study Creative Writing at university. That made the job feel possible. After graduating, she decided to write a novel and see what happened.

The first try did not become the book on shelves.

She has been open about that stage. The first manuscript she queried was a modern-day fantasy about friends on a ghostly quest, and she sent it to around seventy agents. Most passed. A few were interested. One asked to see other ideas too, and that changed everything. Among the partials she sent was To Kill a Kingdom, which was only a few chapters old at the time.

That book became the breakthrough. Christo put aside the finished manuscript she had expected to debut with and started building To Kill a Kingdom under deadline instead. She later recalled taking calls from her agent in a stairwell at work while the book was being pitched. The deal was signed in 2015, and the novel reached readers in 2018.

Readers who start with To Kill a Kingdom usually meet the parts of her writing that keep showing up: dangerous girls, reluctant alliances, romance with teeth, and fantasy worlds that feel a little rough around the edges. It reworks The Little Mermaid into a story about a siren princess and a prince who hunts her kind. Christo has said she was drawn both to the darker side of Hans Christian Andersen's tale and to the sense of adventure she loved in Peter Pan.

She did not stay in one lane for long.

With Into the Crooked Place and City of Spells, she moved from sea fantasy into city streets, gangs, fighting rings, and black-market magic. The duology follows four outsiders in Creije, and it leans harder into group dynamics, shifting loyalties, and found family under pressure. Then Princess of Souls brought in witches, cursed fate, and a Rapunzel thread, while The Night Hunt pushed further into monsters and Greek mythology.

Across the books, Christo keeps coming back to a few simple questions: Who gets to decide who you are? What do you owe the people who raised you, ruled you, or used you? And what happens when someone who has been told they are dangerous decides to choose tenderness anyway? That focus is part of why her stories connect so well with young adult fantasy readers. Even when the settings are full of sirens, witches, or gods, the emotional core is usually about identity, loyalty, and making your own choices.

Off the page, she comes across as practical and funny about publishing. She has said that if you want to write, you are already a writer, and her own path backs that up. It was not a straight line. It was reading early, studying the craft, surviving rejection, and then sticking with the idea long enough for the right book to find the right moment. She has also joked that when she is not writing, she is usually pretending she knows how to garden or looking for a good food tour. That mix of dark imagination and grounded honesty is a big part of her appeal.