Alwyn Hamilton Books in Order

If you want the classic entry point: Rebel of the Sands
If you want the full rebel storyline: Rebel of the Sands → Traitor to the Throne → Hero at the Fall
If you want high society magic and murder: The Notorious Virtues
If you want a quick tour of both sides of her work: Rebel of the Sands → The Notorious Virtues

Alwyn Hamilton was born in Toronto and spent her earliest years moving between Canada and Europe before her family settled in the small French town of Beaune. She grew up there, but read in English, which mattered because English was her first language even while daily life around her was French.

Because of that, books became a private world as well as a shared one. She has said that many of the stories she loved were not the same books other kids at school were reading, so writing became a place to put all that excitement. It was a way to answer back to the stories she cared about.

Books were her passport.

She was especially drawn to fantasy, folklore, and girls who stepped outside the rules, including heroines who used disguises and made their own luck. That thread still runs through her fiction. Her main characters tend to be bright, restless, and unwilling to accept the role their families or their world hand them.

Hamilton left France to study History of Art at King's College, Cambridge, and then moved to London. Before publishing novels, she worked at an auction house, including in Islamic art and with rugs and carpets. That job put her close to objects with long histories behind them, which feels like a good fit for a writer who likes old stories, layered worlds, and places where the past still pushes on the present.

The idea for Rebel of the Sands came when a few interests snapped together. She wanted to write a female sharpshooter. She was thinking about the Wild West. And she was also interested in the storytelling tradition of One Thousand and One Nights. While working full time, she began building a desert fantasy where guns, trains, myth, and rebellion could all live in the same world.

When Rebel of the Sands arrived in 2016, it quickly found readers. People responded to Amani, the sharp-tongued gunslinger at the center, and to Hamilton's mix of action, romance, folklore, and political tension. The story grew into a trilogy with Traitor to the Throne and Hero at the Fall, expanding from one girl's desperate escape into a much larger fight over freedom, loyalty, and power. Her debut also won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Debut Author in 2016.

She does not really write girls who sit quietly and wait.

Her later novel The Notorious Virtues shows another side of her imagination. It trades open desert for glittering wealth, inheritance games, family rivalry, and murder mystery, but it keeps her interest in pressure, performance, and the messy question of who gets to choose their own future. Hamilton now lives in London, in a lavender house with a little free library out front for the moments when her shelves overflow. It suits a writer whose books love old stories but never leave them untouched.