JA Andrews Books in Order

JA Andrews writes epic fantasy full of magic, dragons, and people who are trying hard to do the right thing even when the world is falling apart around them. She lives in the Rocky Mountains of Montana with her husband and three children, surrounded by big skies and a lot of stars.

As a kid she loved two things that did not seem to fit together at all, numbers and stories. She devoured classic fantasy from the eighties and nineties, discovering writers like David Eddings, Anne McCaffrey, Raymond Feist, Terry Brooks, and the Dragonlance novels, while also happily working her way through math and science classes.

That mix pushed her toward engineering when it came time for college. She eventually found her way into aerospace engineering, fascinated by the idea of designing machines that could move through the strange environment of space. After graduation she worked as an engineer in telecommunications, doing solid, practical work that never quite scratched the creative itch.

At home, though, she kept reaching for other ways to tell stories.

The turning point came when her husband had to leave for a long work trip while their children were small. Missing him and needing a project, she started writing a fantasy story one chapter at a time and emailing it to him in the evenings. That rough draft eventually grew into A Threat of Shadows, the first novel in what became The Keeper Chronicles.

Those books follow Keepers, wandering storytellers and mages who carry history, magic, and a lot of books from village to village. Across A Threat of Shadows, Pursuit of Shadows, and Siege of Shadows, Andrews sends a weary former Keeper, a self-doubting storyteller, and a newly freed ex-slave across a world of dwarven halls, elven forests, frost goblins, and very dangerous dragons. The stakes grow to include the fate of the entire land, but the heart of each book stays with a few people wrestling with guilt, loyalty, and the cost of doing the right thing when it hurts.

Her prequel trilogy, Dragon's Reach, Raven's Ruin, and Phoenix Rising, steps back hundreds of years to the days before there were Keepers or even the country of Queensland. It follows Sable, a thief who can feel truth in spoken words, as she claws her way out of the slums, finds a strange kind of family with a traveling acting troupe, and is pulled into a quiet war with the conquering Kalesh Empire. The story mixes theater stages, council chambers, and street-level survival while asking how one woman's voice can change the shape of a nation.

More recently, Andrews has continued to build out the same world in the Aenigma Lights trilogy, starting with Runelight and Mistlight, stories that lean into mysterious magical puzzles, treasure hunts, and long friendships. Alongside the novels she writes short fiction set between and around the main books, often returning to side characters whose stories still have a few more corners to explore.

Outside the page, she homeschools her kids, helps run online fantasy communities, and jokes about being an 'unemployed rocket scientist' who now uses her degree mostly to say that something really is not rocket science. She often mentions how grateful she is to C. S. Lewis for Narnia, wishes she could trade letters with Jane Austen, and half seriously complains that no one has yet provided her with a real house elf to help with the laundry. Under the humor is a simple goal, to write fantasy that brings back the sense of wonder she felt as a reader, with stories that are hopeful, character driven, and just a little bit luminous.