Brian Staveley Books in Order

If you want the full Annurian saga in order: The Emperor's Blades → The Providence of Fire → The Last Mortal Bond → The Empire's Ruin.
If you prefer a standalone entry point: Skullsworn.
If you just want a quick short story taste: The Log Goblin.

Brian Staveley writes big, character driven epic fantasy set in a secondary world of empires, gods, and elite soldiers who ride giant war hawks. He is best known for the Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne trilogy and the later novels that return to that world.

He grew up in New England, spending a lot of time in the woods of New Hampshire with fantasy paperbacks tucked into his pack. As a kid he read anything with swords and strange maps, and that mix of imagined battles and real military history stuck with him.

Staveley studied poetry and literature in college and went on to earn an MA in poetry from Boston University, an experience that sharpened his sense of rhythm, image, and line by line detail.

Before publishing fiction he spent more than a decade teaching literature, religion, history, and philosophy, mostly at a high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During those years he wrote poems and essays, edited for a small poetry press, and used long summers to chip away at his first fantasy novel.

At one point he left the classroom and moved to Asia for a year so he could live cheaply and focus on a book. Working out of guesthouses and small towns, he drafted what would eventually become The Emperor's Blades, the opening volume in his Annurian saga.

When the book finally appeared in print it introduced readers to Kaden, Valyn, and Adare, the three royal siblings at the center of The Emperor's Blades, The Providence of Fire, and The Last Mortal Bond. The debut won the David Gemmell Morningstar Award, picked up a Reddit Stabby for best first novel, reached the semifinals of the Goodreads Choice Awards, and was translated into more than a dozen languages along with the rest of the trilogy.

Staveley has continued to explore the same world from new angles. Skullsworn steps back in time to follow Pyrre Lakatur, an acolyte of the God of Death, on a bloody trial that tests her ideas about love and faith. The Empire's Ruin begins the Ashes of the Unhewn Throne series, shifting the focus to a crumbling empire, broken magic, and new protagonists struggling on the edges of the map.

Across these books he draws heavily on his background in philosophy, religion, and history, using the tools of epic fantasy to ask what people owe their gods, their countries, and the families who shaped them.

Today Staveley lives with his family on a steep dirt road in the mountains of southern Vermont. When he is not at his desk he is often outside running trails, splitting wood, skiing, or chasing his son down a hill on a mountain bike, the kind of everyday details that lend weight to the hardships his characters face.

He balances that physical side of life with a steady writing routine, returning again and again to the Annurian Empire and its wide cast of soldiers, monks, priests, and schemers, always looking for new corners of the world and new questions worth asking.