Jonathan Auxier Books in Order

Jonathan Auxier grew up near Vancouver, British Columbia, and now lives in Pittsburgh with his family. He writes middle grade books full of strange children, dark corners, odd creatures, and a big heart underneath it all. His books can be spooky, but they are rarely cruel.

Before his novels found a wide audience, he studied story from several angles. He earned a BA from Trinity Western University and an MFA in dramatic writing from Carnegie Mellon, where theater and screenwriting shaped the way he thinks about plot, pace, and scene. After graduate school he spent time in Los Angeles working as a screenwriter, then eventually made his way back to Pittsburgh.

The shift toward books came when he stopped trying to second-guess what he ought to write. While he was supposed to be working on a screenplay in graduate school, he started Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes as a side project, more or less writing the kind of story he would have loved as a kid.

That detour changed everything.

Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes introduced readers to a blind orphan who is also an expert thief, then tossed him into a quest full of magical eyes, sea voyages, and the gloriously hard-to-describe Sir Tode. Its sequel, Sophie Quire and the Last Storyguard, opens the world wider through a gifted bookmender who discovers that stories themselves can be powerful, risky things. Readers tend to come to these books for the adventure, then stay for the wit, the warmth, and the sense that even the oddest detail might matter later.

Books matter a lot in Auxier's fiction.

You can see that clearly in The Night Gardener, a spooky Victorian tale about Irish siblings, a crumbling house, and a tree that grants wishes at a terrible cost. Then there is Sweep, set in nineteenth-century London, where Nan Sparrow survives the brutal world of child chimney sweeps and finds an unlikely friend in Charlie, a soot golem. The Night Gardener won the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award, and Sweep went on to win the Governor General's Award and the Sydney Taylor Book Award.

Even when the setting changes, Auxier keeps circling the same ideas. He writes about children who are overlooked, used, or underestimated. He likes found families, dangerous journeys, and the way stories can rescue people, but can also trap them when they are built on greed or fear. His books often place a frightened kid beside a creature or companion who looks strange from the outside and turns out to be deeply worth loving. He returns again and again to the question of who gets protected, and what kindness costs when the world is already dangerous.

He can scale that sensibility up or down. In The Fabled Stables books, the tone is lighter and funnier, but the pattern still holds: a child at the edge of things, a mission to help a strange creature, and a reminder that gentleness is a kind of strength. That range is one reason his bibliography is easy to recommend across ages.

Auxier has also spent time helping other writers through Story Guild, a mentorship program he founded for unpublished authors. That fits the larger picture. His work feels built by someone who takes storytelling seriously, but never forgets that reading should still feel like wonder, play, and a little bit of danger.