Angela Carter Books in Order

In a grubby Bristol underworld, junk-shop partners Morris and Honeybuzzard circle around the damaged Ghislaine. Carter turns their tangled loyalties into a dark, tense study of attraction, cruelty, and dependence.

After her parents die, Melanie is sent to live with relatives in a gloomy London toyshop ruled by the tyrannical Uncle Philip. Childhood games quickly turn threatening as the house closes in around her.

Joseph Harker, a dropout drifting through Bristol after a breakdown, moves through parties, bedsits, and sudden bursts of vision. The novel is messy on purpose, turning confusion and alienation into its real subject.

After catastrophe has broken society into fenced-off factions, Marianne leaves the Professors and ventures among the Barbarians. What begins as escape turns into a harsh lesson about freedom, power, and survival.

When trouble falls on her home after the parrots leave the jungle, Miss Z sets out to bring them back. Her journey leads through a bright, odd fairy-tale world of lions, unicorns, and trickster birds.

A prince trapped in donkey form sets out on a fairy-tale quest to win back his human shape. Carter keeps the old folk tale's strangeness while giving it a brisk, playful energy.

Lee, his fragile wife Annabel, and his restless brother Buzz are locked in a tight emotional triangle that keeps curdling into cruelty. Carter makes their small world feel claustrophobic, intimate, and doomed.

As Doctor Hoffman's machines turn desire into living hallucination, civil servant Desiderio is sent into a world where reason no longer holds. His quest becomes a surreal chase through sex, illusion, and danger.

A later selection of Carter's essays and reviews, wide-ranging enough to move from the Brothers Grimm to contemporary fiction and food writing. It shows how quick, funny, and unsentimental she could be on the page.

These nine stories, many shaped by Carter's time in Japan, move through mirrors, masks, erotic danger, and sudden violence. The settings shift, but the mood stays dreamlike, exact, and quietly menacing.

An Englishman travels into a violent, collapsing America and is forcibly remade as Eve. Carter turns the journey into a wild, disturbing exploration of gender, myth, and the uses of power.

Carter takes on the Marquis de Sade and the politics of pornography in a book that is argumentative, provocative, and still challenging. It asks who gets to desire, who gets used, and how stories shape power.

Part picture book, part playful alphabet, this is a gallery of feline personalities in words and images. Carter's text is light, funny, and fond of cats without making them sentimental.

This landmark collection rewrites fairy tales into darker, stranger forms, from Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast to Little Red Riding Hood. Desire, danger, and female agency drive every glittering, unsettling story.

An illustrated beginner's music book for children, using playful characters and simple exercises to introduce rhythm, notes, and instruments. It is designed to make first steps in music feel friendly and hands-on.

In this standalone story, Carter reimagines Jeanne Duval, the woman long reduced to the role of Baudelaire's muse. She gives Duval back her presence, sensuality, and a life beyond somebody else's legend.

When Tom's shadow slips away in the night, he follows it through a dreamlike world of talking trees, animals, and moonlit wonders. Carter's text turns a bedtime fear into a strange, reassuring fantasy.

This selection of essays and journalism shows Carter as a lively critic and observer, moving from literature and food to travel and politics. It is a good way to meet the sharp, curious mind behind the fiction.

In 1899, American journalist Jack Walser sets out to expose Sophie Fevvers, a Cockney aerialist who claims she was born with wings. Following her into the circus, he finds a world where performance, desire, and truth keep slipping out of reach.

These stories return to women and other figures history has flattened into myths, including Jeanne Duval and Lizzie Borden. Carter mixes biography, fable, and gothic unease to make old legends feel unstable again.

This volume gathers Carter's radio plays, including work on Richard Dadd, Ronald Firbank, and her own fairy-tale material. It shows how easily her imagination moved from prose into performance and voice.

This Canadian volume brings together the short stories of Fireworks and the novel Love. It offers an intense pairing of Carter's dreamlike early fiction and one of her bleakest studies of intimacy.

An illustrated tribute to Frida Kahlo, paired with Angela Carter's text on the artist's image, pain, and self-invention. It is as much about how Kahlo made herself visible as it is about the pictures themselves.

A wide-ranging collection of journalism, reviews, essays, and occasional pieces that shows how much Carter noticed, and how sharply she wrote about it. Books, politics, film, food, and folklore all come under her eye.

Dora Chance, seventy-five and gloriously unfiltered, tells the story of her showbiz family, her twin sister, and their tangled ties to a grand Shakespearean dynasty. It is bawdy, funny, and unexpectedly tender.

Published after her death, this collection ranges from American folklore to European ghost stories and fairy-tale reworkings. The stories feel various, but all carry Carter's taste for the uncanny and half-believed legend.

This big collected volume brings together Carter's short fiction across her whole career, along with pieces previously uncollected in book form. It is the easiest way to see the full sweep of her restless story world.

These brief pieces revisit the Lizzie Borden legend from inside the house, and inside Lizzie's imagination. Carter turns a famous crime into something hotter, stranger, and more unsettling than a simple true-crime tale.

This posthumous collection gathers Carter's plays, radio scripts, film work, and an opera libretto. It includes her screenplays for The Company of Wolves and The Magic Toyshop, plus other dramatic experiments.

A collection of Angela Carter's early poems, full of myth, metamorphosis, and sharp reversals. You can already see many of the images and obsessions that later shaped her fiction taking form here.

Sea-Cat lives under the sea in beautiful clothes made by his loving mother, until the gloomy Dragon King grows jealous. It is a small, odd fairy tale about beauty, kindness, and being seen.

Carter translates Charles Perrault's fairy tales with clarity, bite, and an ear for their older, harsher edges. Familiar stories like Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood come back sounding less cozy and more unsettling.

This slim edition returns to one of the darkest classic fairy tales, where marriage, curiosity, and mortal danger are bound together. Carter's touch keeps the story crisp, eerie, and impossible to read as a simple bedtime tale.

A short critical study of Carter's vampire story, focusing on the Countess, the soldier, and the tale's challenge to patriarchal gender roles. It is aimed at readers interested in feminist readings of the text.

A contemporary relationship drama about a heroine whose search for love leads her through one bad choice after another. The tension comes from watching how each wrong turn narrows her way out.