James Islington Books in Order

James Islington grew up in southern Victoria, Australia, where fantasy stories were an early part of his reading life. Raymond E. Feist and Robert Jordan were important influences, and he has pointed to Feist's Magician as the first fantasy novel he read.

For years, writing a novel was an ambition rather than a job. Then he read Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn books and Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind. Those books gave him the push to sit down and try building a story of his own.

That story became The Shadow of What Was Lost, first released in 2014. It introduced the world of Andarra, where a young man named Davian discovers he can use a forbidden kind of magic, and where an old war may not be as finished as everyone believes.

The book opened the Licanius Trilogy, followed by An Echo of Things to Come and The Light of All That Falls. The series follows Davian, Wirr, Asha, and Caeden through a large-scale conflict shaped by lost history, dangerous magic, memory, and prophecies that people cannot simply explain away.

Time matters in these books.

Islington has said that time travel and a redemptive arc were the two core ideas he started with for Licanius. That helps explain why the trilogy keeps returning to questions of fate, choice, responsibility, and whether someone can become more than the worst thing they have done. Readers who like intricate fantasy often come to these books for the clues, the shifting points of view, and the feeling that small details may matter much later.

After completing Licanius, Islington began a new fantasy sequence with The Will of the Many. Its setting is the Catenan Republic, a society where people surrender their Will, their strength, focus, and drive, to those above them. The central character, Vis Telimus, enters an elite academy under a false identity while carrying a private mission and a deep reason to distrust the ruling order.

The stakes get larger fast.

The second Hierarchy novel, The Strength of the Few, continues Vis's story as its mysteries stretch beyond the Republic. Islington's newer work keeps the careful plotting of Licanius but uses a different setting, one built around political power, class divisions, school rivalries, and the cost of survival.

He has also moved into science fiction with Scion, a cyberpunk thriller set in a future of extreme wealth, debt, and life-extending technology. Across fantasy and science fiction, his books tend to put ordinary personal loyalties under pressure from systems that are much bigger than any one character.

Islington lives on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia, with his wife and two children. He continues to write from there, moving between big imagined worlds while keeping a close eye on the human choices inside them.