Ingo Chronicles Books in Order

The Ingo Chronicles begin on the Cornish coast, where the sea is beautiful, familiar, and never entirely safe. At the centre of the first books are Sapphire, usually called Sapphy, and her brother Conor. After their father disappears at sea, both children feel the pull of the water more strongly than ever. What begins as grief and curiosity opens into a discovery that changes the whole shape of their world: beneath the waves lies Ingo, the realm of the Mer.

The sea is never just scenery here.

One of the pleasures of this series is the way Dunmore makes Ingo feel both magical and physical. This is not a neat fantasy kingdom cut off from real life. It is a place of currents, tides, creatures, cold, pressure, and old laws. Sapphy and Conor meet the Mer siblings Faro and Elvira, learn to travel underwater, and slowly realise that their own family history is bound up with the world below. The books keep asking the same hard question in different ways: if you belong to two worlds, how do you choose between them?

That tension between land and sea drives the whole sequence. On land there is family, school, money worries, and the ache left by their father's disappearance. In Ingo there is freedom, beauty, danger, and a deep sense of recognition. Sapphy in particular feels how seductive that second life can be. Conor understands the pull too, but often sees the risks more clearly. Their different responses give the series much of its emotional energy.

As the books go on, the scale widens. What starts as a mystery about one family becomes a larger story about ancient powers, loyalties within the Mer world, and the threat of forces no one fully controls. The Tide Knot deepens the conflict by showing how hard it is for Sapphy to live an ordinary life on land once Ingo has claimed part of her imagination. The Deep raises the stakes again with a danger that reaches into both Air and Ingo. The Crossing of Ingo turns the story into a full adventure journey, with Sapphy, Conor, Faro, and Elvira pushed toward the edge of what humans and Mer can survive.

What makes these books work so well is that the fantasy never loses touch with family feeling. Dunmore writes about siblings, missing parents, divided homes, and belonging just as carefully as she writes about underwater kingdoms. The mood shifts between wonder and threat, often in the same scene. The sea can feel like refuge one moment and a trap the next.

Read in order, the series builds beautifully from local legend into a larger mythic world. Start with Ingo, then move through The Tide Knot, The Deep, and The Crossing of Ingo. Stormswept returns to the same sea-haunted imaginative world, carrying forward Dunmore's fascination with storms, family, and the dangerous call of the coast.