Boris Akunin Books in Order

If you want to start with Fandorin's first case: The Winter Queen → The Turkish Gambit → Murder on the Leviathan → The Death of Achilles
If you enjoy varied historical mysteries: Special Assignments → The State Counsellor → The Coronation
If you prefer clerical or cozier mysteries: Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog → Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk → Pelagia and the Red Rooster
If you want later, darker Fandorin adventures: All The World's a Stage → Black City → Not Saying Goodbye
If you are curious about Akunin's historical drama: To Kill a Serpent in the Shell

Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, a Georgian born Russian writer known for elegant historical detective novels set in late imperial Russia. He is also a translator, essayist, and playwright, and has spent decades moving between scholarship and genre fiction. His books have sold in the millions and have introduced many readers to Russian history through fast moving mysteries.

Chkhartishvili was born in 1956 in the industrial town of Zestaponi, in what was then the Georgian Soviet republic, to a Georgian father and a Jewish mother. When he was still a small child the family moved to Moscow, where he grew up surrounded by Russian language and literature. The mix of cultures at home and the shelves of books around him helped shape his curiosity about how stories work.

As a student he chose a path that would stay with him for life, the study of Japan.

At the Institute of Asian and African Countries at Moscow State University he trained as a Japanologist, learning the language and immersing himself in Japanese history, theatre, and philosophy. After graduating he worked as a literary translator from Japanese and English, bringing into Russian the work of writers such as Yukio Mishima, Yasushi Inoue, Masahiko Shimada, Kobo Abe, T. C. Boyle, Malcolm Bradbury, Peter Ustinov, and others. Translation taught him how different authors build suspense, shape characters, and pace a scene, lessons he later reused in his own fiction.

He also built a parallel career as an editor and literary organizer. Chkhartishvili served at the magazine Foreign Literature and became deeply involved in large cultural projects, including a twenty volume Anthology of Japanese Literature and the Pushkin Library, which aimed to make key works of world literature widely available in Russian. These years fixed his reputation inside Russia as a serious critic and scholar, even before anyone knew the name Boris Akunin.

In the late 1990s he quietly set out to write the kind of detective novel he and his friends would not be ashamed to read on the subway, at once playful and well written. He adopted the ambiguous signature 'B. Akunin', later explained as Boris and as a Japanese word for a villain, and in 1998 published The Winter Queen, the first book about young investigator Erast Fandorin. The book did modestly at first, then found an enthusiastic audience, and soon the Fandorin series became one of the most widely read in modern Russian fiction.

Across the Fandorin novels, including The Turkish Gambit, Murder on the Leviathan, The Death of Achilles and many later volumes, Akunin moves his hero through key moments in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russian history. Each story leans into a different subgenre, from spy tale to closed circle mystery, yet the books share the same mix of wit, puzzles, and close attention to period detail. He wrote a parallel trilogy about an Orthodox nun sleuth in Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog, Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk, and Pelagia and the Red Rooster, blending clerical mystery with questions of faith and doubt.

Alongside the crime fiction he has continued to publish essays, literary criticism, and experimental works. Under his own name he launched a long running project on the history of Russian statehood, pairing non fiction volumes with companion novels that dramatize the same eras. He has also written under other pseudonyms, including Anatoly Brusnikin and Anna Borisova, when he wanted to try out different voices and genres.

In 2014 Akunin left Moscow and has since lived mostly in Western Europe, eventually settling in London while continuing to write. He is married to Erika Ernestovna, an editor and translator who has been part of his literary life from the start. Away from the public debates around Russia and its politics, readers mainly meet him on the page, where his work combines a love of puzzle plots, a feel for everyday human motives, and a steady fascination with how history shapes individual lives.