Daughter of Smoke & Bone Books in Order

The Daughter of Smoke and Bone books start in Prague, where Karou looks like an art student with an unusually active imagination. She fills sketchbooks with monsters, disappears on odd errands, and moves through the city as if she belongs to several lives at once. She kind of does. The secret center of the series is Brimstone's shop, a hidden place reached through magical doorways, where Karou was raised among chimaera and where teeth are part of a much bigger mystery.

Brimstone is one reason the opening book works so well. He is stern, mysterious, and oddly tender, and the household around him gives the story its found-family pull long before the epic fantasy side fully opens up. Karou's best friend Zuzana brings humor, bite, and a very grounded kind of loyalty, which keeps the books lively even when the mythology starts getting heavy.

When Karou crosses paths with Akiva, a seraph warrior marked by an old war, the story opens outward fast. What first feels like a strange romance and identity puzzle becomes a fantasy about memory, history, and the damage done by endless conflict. Karou is not just caught between worlds. She is tied to both of them, and that makes every choice harder.

This series gets bigger as it goes.

Days of Blood and Starlight and Dreams of Gods and Monsters pull the camera back from Prague's lanes and bridges to battlefields, hideouts, and the human world beyond the portal doors. The central struggle is the long war between chimaera and seraphim, but the books are just as interested in whether people can step outside the roles history has handed them. Karou and Akiva matter, but so do the rebels, monsters, friends, and soldiers around them, especially when old loyalties start to crack.

Prague matters here. Taylor uses its winter streets, art-school energy, and fairy-tale atmosphere as a grounded doorway into something much wilder. The books can be funny and tender one minute, then grim and war-heavy the next. If you like fantasy that mixes romance with found family, moral knots, and creatures who feel fully alive, this series has a lot to offer.

There is also a companion novella, Night of Cake & Puppets, which shifts the spotlight to Zuzana and Mik for a magical first date through Prague. It is lighter, sweeter, and smaller in scale, but it fits the same world and gives the series a welcome breath of warmth. Taken together, these books offer urban fantasy, epic war, and star-crossed romance, all built around one of Taylor's favorite questions: can people shaped by violence choose something better?