Anne Steelyard: The Garden of Emptiness Books in Order

This graphic trilogy follows Anne Steelyard, a female archaeologist working in pre-World War I Mesopotamia, and that premise gives the series a strong identity right away. Anne is brilliant, determined, and operating in a world that is not built to take a woman like her seriously. That tension is not background decoration. It shapes the whole story.

The books mix archaeology, mysticism, imperial politics, and adventure. Anne is not just digging through old stones for academic glory. She is moving through a landscape crowded with competing powers, old beliefs, and men who assume they should be the ones naming the past. Hambly uses that setup to create a story about scholarship and possession, who gets to interpret history, and who pays when ancient forces are treated as trophies.

The desert setting does a lot of work.

There is heat, distance, wariness, and the constant feeling that modern political games are being played over ground far older than the empires currently fighting across it. Later volumes deepen the mystical side and bring in wartime anxiety, espionage, and genuinely dangerous discoveries.

Because the series is told in graphic-novel form, it moves a little differently from Hambly's prose fiction. The visual storytelling helps the atmosphere, especially when dreams, visions, or ancient spaces take over the page.

If you like historical adventure with a smart, stubborn heroine and a strong thread of mystical danger, Anne Steelyard offers something a bit different from Hambly's better-known series.