Anna James Books in Order

Anna James grew up in Northumberland, where books and libraries gave her a way to travel far beyond the small village around her. She was a big reader first, and the idea that stories could open up a much larger world has stayed at the center of her work.

Her route to writing novels was properly bookish. James worked for five years as a secondary-school librarian in the Midlands, then took on jobs as a literary scout and journalist. She later became Book News Editor at The Bookseller, a role that put her close to the daily bustle of publishing.

She didn't begin by setting out to write fiction. Journalism was already a creative outlet, but eventually she tried telling longer stories for young readers. After leaving her staff role at The Bookseller in 2015 to work freelance, she continued writing about books, publishing, feminism, and theatre, and also worked as Books Editor at ELLE UK.

Then came the bookshop.

Her first children's novel introduced Tilly Pages, a girl who lives with her grandparents above their bookshop, Pages & Co. When Tilly learns she can travel into books, familiar stories become places she can visit, and literary characters become people she can meet. The Bookwanderers launched the Pages & Co. adventures in 2018 and gave James a perfect way to combine a love of classic children's fiction with a mystery about Tilly's family.

The series grows through Tilly and the Lost Fairy Tales, Tilly and the Map of Stories, The Book Smugglers, The Treehouse Library, and The Last Bookwanderer. Readers get fairy-tale mix-ups, hidden libraries, magical trains, and quests through stories old and new. Under the adventure, the books keep returning to friendship, family, curiosity, and the idea that imagination belongs to everyone.

James later created a different kind of fantasy setting in The Age of Enchantment. On the island of Whetherwhy, magic is linked to the changing seasons, and twins Juniper and Rafferty are pulled onto separate paths when Juniper is revealed to be an Enchanter. The Season of Flames widens that world through Elio, a boy who travels with a magical circus and finds himself caught up in a threat to the island's balance.

She has also revisited a much-loved classic in Alice with a Why. Set in 1919, it follows Alyce, the granddaughter of the original Alice, as she discovers that Wonderland is real and badly in need of help. It has the oddness and wordplay readers might hope for, but its young heroine has her own questions to answer.

Books are part of James's day job as well as her fiction. She still works as a freelance journalist and chairs events at bookshops and literary festivals. She lives in north London with her husband, Adam, in a flat full of books.

That sounds about right for a writer whose characters keep finding doors into other stories.