Fairy Tales of New York Books in Order

Fairy Tales of New York is a tightly connected multi-author quartet built around four women, a long friendship, and an old Irish pub in Brooklyn called Sully’s. The fairy-tale part is loose rather than literal. These are contemporary romances that borrow mood and shape from familiar stories, then drop them into adult lives full of class baggage, family history, and inconvenient desire.

The pub is the anchor. The women are the heart.

Kelly Hunter opens the series with Pursued by the Rogue, which follows Dawn Turner and world-class musician Finbar Sullivan. Their story establishes the feel of the whole project, smart women with shared history, men who arrive carrying their own complications, and a New York setting that is not glossy Manhattan fantasy so much as a lived-in social map. Boarding school pasts, old identities, and chosen family all matter here.

Because the books are collaborative and closely linked, the friendships between the women do a lot of structural work. This is not just four separate couples happening to live nearby. The characters share memories, loyalties, and longstanding ideas about themselves and one another. That makes every romance part love story, part adulthood reckoning. Who were you then, who are you now, and what happens when someone wants the version of you that you no longer fully believe in?

Sully’s helps with that atmosphere. The pub is more than a meeting place. It is one of those story locations that gathers people, history, and emotional mess in the same room. Family businesses do that well in romance because they create continuity without needing constant exposition. You understand quickly that lives have been crossing here for years.

Tone-wise, the series is urban, sexy, and friend-forward. The fairy-tale touch adds charm, but the books stay grounded in adult concerns, jobs, expectations, self-protection, and the awkward business of being wanted for real when a more casual arrangement would feel safer. Hunter’s contribution in particular leans into that gap between what a character says she can handle and what she actually wants.

So if you are after New York romance with a strong female friend group, an atmospheric neighborhood base, and just enough fairy-tale shimmer to make the ordinary feel heightened, this is a good page to linger on. Read it for the chemistry, but also for the sense of women carrying old stories into new lives and deciding they do not have to end the same way.