CJ Adrien Books in Order

C.J. Adrien is a French-American historical novelist, teacher, and researcher whose fiction lives deep in the Viking Age. He writes about raiders, monks, kings, and coastal borderlands, especially the worlds around Brittany and western France. That mix of story and scholarship runs through everything he does, from novels to lectures to podcast conversations about the early Middle Ages.

History came first, but storytelling showed him how to make it breathe.

As he has told readers, he started writing young. At twelve he wrote a very earnest tale about a knight storming a castle, which mattered less for its polish than for what it unlocked. In college he returned to creative writing for a while, but history pulled harder. He earned a degree in history, was accepted into a PhD program focused on the early medieval world, and then watched that path fall apart during the Great Recession when the program was shut down.

He became a schoolteacher instead, and that turn seems to have shaped the writer he became. Standing in front of a classroom, Adrien realized people remember the past better when it is told as a story. He began writing with more purpose, using fiction to explore the human side of the Viking world. His first novel, The Line of His People, was self-published in 2013 after a long run of agent rejections. It was followed by The Oath of the Father.

He kept going.

The bigger breakthrough came with The Lords of the Wind, which opens his Hasting books and reimagines the early life of the real Viking warlord Hasting. Readers who move on to In the Shadow of the Beast and The Kings of the Sea find the blend that defines Adrien's fiction: strong historical detail, fast movement, hard choices, and characters shaped by faith, ambition, exile, and violence. His novels are not only about raids and battles. They are also about identity, loyalty, and what power does to a person once he finally gets it. That approach helped the Hasting series build a strong readership and earn recognition that includes a Reader's Favorite gold medal and positive trade reviews.

Outside the novels, Adrien works as a history educator. He teaches courses on medieval topics, gives guest lectures, and writes nonfiction about Viking settlement, Brittany, and the wider early medieval world. He also co-hosts the Vikingology Podcast with Professor Terri Barnes, which suits a writer who clearly enjoys digging into evidence as much as building a scene. His research interests include the Viking diaspora, western France, and the political changes that reshaped Europe as Carolingian power began to crack.

There is a personal thread in the work, too. He has translated his grandfather's memoir, Call of the Open Sea, and he often writes with the sense that history is something people inherit, argue over, and carry with them. These days he lives in Bend, Oregon, with his wife, sons, and a pug named Captain Jean-Luc Pugcard. It suits him. Serious history, vivid storytelling, and one extremely specific dog name can all coexist just fine.