Emma Trevayne Books in Order

For her music-driven dystopia: Coda → Chorus
For a virtual reality thriller: Gamescape
For steampunk adventure: Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times
For spooky, eerie fantasy: The Accidental Afterlife of Thomas Marsden → The House of Months and Years
For a magical quest story: Spindrift and the Orchid

Emma Trevayne writes speculative fiction for kids and teens, the kind that likes one foot in wonder and the other in danger. Her books move between cyberpunk, steampunk, haunted-house fantasy, and eerie adventure, but they tend to circle the same question, what happens when ordinary young people get caught inside systems far bigger than they are?

She has said she read everything she could get her hands on as a child.

Before publication, Trevayne spent years writing plays, partial novels, and other projects that never quite became books. Coda was the first one she finished, and it gave her a clear starting point, a near-future world where music is both pleasure and poison. She has said the idea grew out of songs, cyberpunk movies, and a desire to write the kind of book she wanted to read.

That mix of pop culture energy and careful worldbuilding stuck.

Many readers first meet her through Coda and its sequel Chorus, where encoded music works like an addictive drug and rebellion happens through sound as much as force. The books lean into cyberpunk ideas about control, technology, and free will, but they also make room for siblings, grief, loyalty, and the messy cost of trying to change a broken world. Coda was nominated for YALSA's Best Fiction for Young Adults list and the ALA Rainbow Book List.

From there, Trevayne moved easily between age ranges and styles. Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times drops a boy into a soot-dark mechanical version of London full of metal fairies and clockwork dragons. Gamescape heads back toward science fiction, following a dying teen who enters a virtual reality competition that may be tied to the fate of a collapsing Earth. The Accidental Afterlife of Thomas Marsden, The House of Months and Years, and Spindrift and the Orchid show another side of her work, one that likes old houses, hidden magic, family secrets, and just enough menace to keep the pages turning.

What ties those books together is tone. Trevayne likes big concepts, but she rarely forgets the kid or teen standing in the middle of them. Her protagonists are often resourceful, lonely, stubborn, or a little out of step. Their worlds may involve encoded songs, clockwork birds, faery bargains, or wish-granting orchids, but the emotional engines are usually more familiar, siblings to protect, homes to save, bodies that can fail, and adults who may not be telling the whole truth.

She is a full-time writer, a music collector, a photographer, and someone who loves computer code languages. In interviews she has talked about writing with coffee and music nearby, and about starting the day with a walk for the dog. She has lived in Canada, England, and America, and lives in England.

In other words, the range is wide, but the curiosity is consistent.

If you come to Emma Trevayne for one book, you may not end up staying in the same genre for the next. That is part of the fun. Whether she is writing a punkish dystopia or a haunted middle grade fantasy, she tends to build stories where wonder and unease arrive together, and where young characters have to decide what kind of person they want to be when the rules around them stop making sense.