Another Kingdom Books in Order

The Another Kingdom trilogy drops a struggling Hollywood screenwriter into a medieval fantasy realm and refuses to let him choose which life is real. Austin Lively is a would-be movie insider whose career is going nowhere when he steps through the wrong door and finds himself standing in a dungeon beside a dead body.

In the Eleven Lands of Galiana he is accused of murder and thrust into a tangle of queens, wizards, monsters, and royal intrigue. Back in Los Angeles he is just as endangered, wanted in connection with a killing he cannot remember and hunted by a billionaire power broker with his own twisted vision for the world. Austin slips between the two realities without warning, often at the worst possible moment, and what he does in one place keeps echoing in the other.

Both worlds turn out to be ruled by the same kind of lies.

Over Another Kingdom, The Nightmare Feast, and The Emperor’s Sword, Austin graduates from baffled victim to reluctant hero. He is charged with carrying a talisman across the Eleven Lands to restore a rightful queen, searching for a missing manuscript that seems to rewrite reality, and keeping his sister and the woman he loves alive while assassins close in. The books swing from creepy haunted houses to sun-blasted Hollywood mansions, from ogres and dragon-filled skies to backlot sound stages and gossip sites.

Klavan plays this as fantasy and as satire. The brutal wizard who warps Galiana is not so different from the moguls and ideologues trying to capture every soul in Los Angeles; the conspiracies in one realm rhyme with the conspiracies in the other. The tone bounces between swashbuckling adventure, noir comedy, and earnest conversations about art, faith, and whether truth really has any power in a culture that prefers illusion.

Because the story was first told as a serialized podcast, episodes tend to end on big cliffhangers and reversals. The novels keep that energy while deepening Austin’s relationships and the spiritual questions underneath his journey. By the time The Emperor’s Sword closes, the stakes are nothing less than the condition of his soul and the possibility of redemption in a world that feels rigged against it.

If you like portal fantasy with a sharp contemporary edge, this is where Klavan lets his imagination run wild.