Cherie Dimaline Books in Order

If you want her signature dystopian story: The Marrow Thieves → Hunting by Stars
If you want dark adult fiction with folklore: Empire of Wild → VenCo
If you want tender, eerie young adult fiction: Funeral Songs for Dying Girls → Into the Bright Open
If you want a younger adventure first: Tiger Lily and the Secret Treasure of Neverland
If you want her earlier literary work: Red Rooms → The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy → A Gentle Habit

Cherie Dimaline was born in Orillia, Ontario, and grew up between Toronto and her Georgian Bay Métis community near Penetanguishene. She has written often about going back to the Bay, and that sense of return matters in her work. Land, family memory, and the stories people carry are not background details for her. They are part of how her characters understand themselves.

Story came early.

Dimaline has said that her grandmother, her Mere, was a huge source of stories, and that summers spent back home helped root her in community and culture. As a kid she also worked as her father's magician's assistant, which feels strangely fitting for a writer who is so comfortable letting the everyday tilt into the uncanny. Before books became the center of her public life, she worked a long list of jobs, including museum work, investment management, women's resource work, editing, and community based roles in Indigenous organizations. She also edited magazines, including Muskrat Magazine, and later served as the first Indigenous writer in residence at the Toronto Public Library.

She wanted to write the whole time.

That mix of practical work and old family storytelling helped shape her first books. Red Rooms follows an Indigenous hotel chambermaid who imagines the lives of guests through what they leave behind. The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy turns anxiety, grief, and survival into something almost cosmic, following Ruby Bloom as planets spin around her head. A Gentle Habit, a short story collection, stays close to people trying to keep going in lives that do not make it easy.

Then came The Marrow Thieves, the book that brought her to many new readers. In that novel, a Métis and Indigenous group travels north through a wrecked future where non-Indigenous people have lost the ability to dream and Indigenous people are hunted for their marrow. Readers often respond not just to the high stakes, but to the tenderness inside the danger, the found family, the campfire stories, and the way the book connects a dystopian future to the real history of residential schools. Its sequel, Hunting by Stars, deepens that world and keeps asking what survival costs, and what community can repair.

Dimaline's adult fiction moves just as easily between the real and the haunted. Empire of Wild takes the search for a missing husband and runs it through Métis Rougarou story, grief, religion, and land. VenCo goes in a different direction, building a sharp, funny witch novel around Lucky St. James, her grandmother, and a dangerous hunt for seven magic spoons. Even when the plots get bigger, the pull is still personal. Her books care about aunties, cousins, elders, crushes, jobs, rent, and the long memory of a place.

Her newer young adult work keeps stretching in fresh directions. Funeral Songs for Dying Girls is a ghost story, a grief story, and a first love story all at once. Into the Bright Open remixes The Secret Garden through a Georgian Bay setting, Indigenous characters, queer feeling, and family secrets. Across genres, Dimaline tends to write about young people and women who are trying to see clearly, protect what matters, and make room for themselves in worlds that do not always welcome them.

The awards matter, but they are not the whole story. The Marrow Thieves won the Governor General's Literary Award and the Kirkus Prize, and it helped place her work in classrooms and book clubs far beyond Canada. Just as important is the way her fiction keeps returning to community, to who gets remembered, and to who gets to tell the story in the first place.

She now lives in her home territory in the Georgian Bay Métis community and also works in screen and stage adaptation. That feels right. Her books are visual, talkative, full of movement, and alive to voice. Even when the subject is hard, there is warmth in the telling.