Alice Borchardt Books in Order

Alice Borchardt was born in New Orleans in 1939 and grew up in a family where books and storytelling were part of daily life. She and her younger sister, Anne Rice, made up stories as children, and that habit of imagining whole worlds stayed with her. Borchardt later recalled how much books meant to her as a girl, and that early love of reading helps explain why her fiction feels so steeped in atmosphere, legend, and the pull of the past.

Stories came early.

As a teenager, Borchardt moved with her family to Richardson, Texas. She went on to build a long working life in Houston as a licensed vocational nurse, spending nearly thirty years in a profession that was practical, exhausting, and far removed from the book business. She married Clifford Borchardt and lived in Houston for many years, carrying alongside her nursing career a strong interest in history, especially the rougher, less familiar corners of it.

Writing arrived late, but not by accident.

When staff reductions threatened the hospital where she worked, Borchardt began to think seriously about a second career. Anne Rice encouraged her to try fiction, helped her find an agent, and wrote introductions to some of her books. Borchardt was already in her mid-50s when her first novel, Devoted, appeared in 1995. That late start is part of what makes her career stand out. She published only seven novels, but each one feels connected to the same deep interests, history in upheaval, dangerous desire, old belief systems, and people trying to stay human in brutal times.

Her first pair of books, Devoted and Beguiled, are medieval tales set around Elin and Owen, a woman of the Forest People and the young bishop of Chantalon. Readers who warm to these novels usually like the mix of romance, battle, mysticism, and the sense that Christianity and older pagan traditions are colliding in every part of life. Even before Borchardt turned to shape shifters and Arthurian legend, she was clearly drawn to women with power and to communities under siege.

Then she went wolf.

With The Silver Wolf, Night of the Wolf, and The Wolf King, Borchardt moved into the area many readers know best. These books follow Regeane and Maeniel through Rome, Gaul, Italy, and the shadowy spaces between history and myth. They mix court intrigue, church pressure, war, and werewolf lore, but the appeal is not just the supernatural element. Readers come for the fierce heroines, the rough old-world atmosphere, and the feeling that the beast and the human self are always in uneasy conversation. Borchardt treated the past as a living, unstable place, not a tidy costume backdrop.

She carried that same instinct into The Dragon Queen and The Raven Warrior, her reworking of Arthurian legend through Guinevere's eyes. Borchardt's Guinevere is active, political, magical, and often in danger, which tells you a lot about the kinds of protagonists Borchardt liked to write. Across all her books, the same patterns keep showing up: women with dangerous gifts, men torn between duty and desire, pagan worlds pressing against Christian ones, and historical moments that already feel halfway to myth. Borchardt was still living in Houston during her publishing years, and she died there in 2007 at age 67. She did not leave a large body of work, but she left a distinctive one, strange, romantic, violent, and very much her own.