Emily Wilde Books in Order

The Emily Wilde books are built around a very good mismatch. Emily is brilliant with folklore, field notes, and classification, but much less comfortable with ordinary human company. That makes her a fun guide through a fantasy world where scholarship matters, fairy stories have rules, and the wrong bit of curiosity can get you in real trouble.

These are fieldwork books.

The series opens with Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, where Emily travels to the far northern village of Hrafnsvik to finish her research on the Hidden Ones. She arrives thinking mostly about her work and very little about the locals, which is exactly the sort of attitude that gets tested fast in a small winter community. Heather Fawcett uses that setup well. The snow, the isolation, the village gossip, and the folklore all matter, and Emily's journals make the whole thing feel half adventure story, half academic record.

A big part of the series is Emily's relationship with Wendell Bambleby, the charming fellow scholar who keeps appearing at exactly the wrong moment. He is warm where she is prickly, social where she is private, and much harder to pin down than he first seems. Their back and forth gives the books a lot of their energy. It is romantic, yes, but it is also funny, inconvenient, and tied directly to the larger faerie plot.

By Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands, the story has widened. What begins as one scholar's research trip turns into a series about doors between worlds, old bargains, dangerous family politics, and the uneasy border between the mortal world and Faerie. Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales pushes that even further, carrying Emily into the heart of a faerie kingdom where book learning is helpful, but never quite enough on its own.

That friction powers the whole series.

If you are wondering what kind of fantasy this is, think cozy in texture but not always in stakes. The books love cottages, tea, libraries, footnotes, and long stretches of winter weather. They also love sharp-toothed fair folk, curses, kidnappings, and the kind of old story logic that can turn on a single promise. Emily herself is a big reason it works. She is dry, stubborn, observant, and often very funny without trying to be.

Readers who like folklore-heavy fantasy usually click with this series quickly. So do readers who enjoy academic settings, travel adventures, and romances that grow out of respect as much as attraction. The books are best read in order, because Emily and Wendell's relationship, and the larger faerie conflict around them, build from one installment to the next.