Jessica Leake Books in Order

If you want romantic Edwardian fantasy: Arcana → The Order of the Eternal Sun
If you want Celtic and Norse mythology: Beyond a Darkened Shore
If you want a wintry fairy-tale feel: Through the White Wood
If you want everything in publication order: Arcana → The Order of the Eternal Sun → Beyond a Darkened Shore → Through the White Wood

Jessica Leake has been writing since she was a kid. She has said her first book was scribbled on a yellow legal pad and probably had unicorns in it, which tells you a lot about the kinds of stories that first pulled her in. Fantasy, romance, and the feeling that something strange might be hiding just offstage have stayed with her ever since.

Before publishing novels, Leake trained as a psychotherapist and worked for years on the psychiatric wards of a hospital. She kept writing all through that stretch, even while building a career that asked for a very different kind of attention. The work was serious and people-centered, and you can feel some of that in her fiction, where characters usually have to reckon with fear, desire, and the private things they do not say out loud.

Then maternity leave changed the plan.

When she was home with her first child, she began to think seriously about writing full time. She learned the publishing side step by step, finding critique partners, studying how queries worked, and figuring out when a manuscript needed more work and when it needed to be set aside. Two shelved manuscripts came before the one that finally got her an agent, which gives you a good sense of the persistence behind the books.

Her debut novel, Arcana, came out in 2014 and introduced the Edwardian world of the Sylvani books. It was followed by The Order of the Eternal Sun in 2016. Those novels mix London society, secret magic, family tension, and romance, and they show one of Leake's favorite setups: a young woman trying to move through a rule-bound world while hiding power that could upend her life.

She likes beautiful settings with sharp edges.

That same blend shows up in her young adult historical fantasies. Beyond a Darkened Shore moves to 11th-century Ireland, where Celtic and Norse mythology, warfare, and prophecy collide around Ciara, a princess with dangerous abilities. Through the White Wood heads to 11th-century Russia and pairs an outcast girl with ice magic and a prince who can summon fire. Readers who pick up Leake usually come for the atmosphere and the romance, then stay for heroines who have to learn what their gifts cost.

Her books often center on young women coming into their own under pressure. Magic is never just decorative. It can protect, tempt, isolate, or force a character to choose between duty and love. She also returns again and again to historical settings, not as background wallpaper, but as part of the tension, because social rules, politics, and old belief systems all shape what her characters can risk.

There is a very grounded side to all that fantasy. Leake has written about being horse-crazy as a child, starting riding lessons around age six or seven, getting an Arabian mare at twelve, and competing in dressage through high school. That kind of detail helps explain why riding, movement, and physical confidence feel so natural in many of her stories.

These days she lives in South Carolina and moved back to her adopted hometown of Greenville. She and her husband, whom she has known since high school, have four children, chickens, and two dogs. It sounds like the sort of household where there is always noise, always motion, and probably never enough shelf space for all the books.