Fly By Night Books in Order

The Fly By Night books follow Mosca Mye, one of Frances Hardinge's great young troublemakers. At the start she is a twelve-year-old orphan with a sharp mind, a gift for lying, and a homicidal goose named Saracen. That tells you something about the tone straight away. These books are funny, but the jokes live right beside censorship, fanaticism, poverty, and political danger.

The setting is a skewed, invented realm with a strong eighteenth-century feel. Printing, pamphlets, religion, and rumor all matter. In Fly by Night, Mosca flees her bleak village with Eponymous Clent, a silver-tongued con man who is part mentor, part burden, and part survival strategy. When they reach Mandelion, they step into a city full of plots, guilds, spies, smugglers, and people who understand that words can move crowds as surely as armies.

Words are weapons here.

That is one of the big pleasures of the series. The stakes are political, but they are never dry. Hardinge turns control of books, news, and public belief into something tense, messy, and often darkly funny. Mosca survives by listening hard, talking fast, and noticing what others miss. She is not a chosen one and not especially well protected. She is simply clever enough to keep moving, which makes every scrape feel earned.

In Twilight Robbery / Fly Trap, the scale widens without losing that scrappy energy. Mosca and Clent arrive in Toll, a town divided between the respectable world of day and the more dangerous life that wakes after dark. A kidnap plot pulls them into class tension, old grievances, civic rot, and a city with two faces. The series stays adventurous, but it also becomes more interested in how power hides inside customs, institutions, and supposedly normal arrangements.

Saracen still helps, mostly by being terrible.

If you like fantasy that feels verbal, sly, and slightly feral, this is a good place to land. Expect odd names, crooked adults, secret histories, and a heroine who is always learning how much trouble language can make and undo. The Fly By Night books are adventurous enough for younger readers, but they never talk down, and the invented politics give the whole thing much more bite than a simple caper series.