Kim Liggett Books in Order

Kim Liggett grew up in a small town in Kansas, where local history and old legends were part of the landscape. One story that stayed with her involved the Spanish explorer Coronado, a figure who would later help shape the dark mythology behind Blood and Salt.

At sixteen, she left her rural Midwestern home for New York City. She wanted to pursue music and acting, and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts while singing backup for major rock bands during the 1980s.

It was a big change from small-town Kansas.

After starting a family, Liggett took a different route and became an entrepreneur. She created a children's art education program and a travel company that organized tours for musicians. Those jobs gave her a varied working life before her fiction career took center stage.

Her debut novel, Blood and Salt, was published in 2015. It introduces Ash Larkin, a teen pulled toward an isolated Kansas commune, family secrets, alchemy, immortality, and a dangerous romance. The sequel, Heart of Ash, moves the story into a more glamorous but equally uneasy world as Ash confronts the forces still controlling Dane and threatening her family.

Liggett's books tend to put young people under real pressure. Her characters face inherited secrets, tight-knit communities, guilt, survival, and systems that expect them to stay quiet. The settings matter, too. Cornfields, ranches, caves, and remote wilderness aren't just backdrops. They close in on the characters and make every choice feel harder.

The Last Harvest takes that approach to rural Oklahoma. Former football star Clay Tate is forced to reckon with his father's death, a town haunted by violence, and rumors of devil worship that may not be rumors at all. The book won the 2017 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

Then came The Unfortunates, a tense survival story about Grant Tavish, the privileged son of a senator who wants to answer for a fatal mistake. Trapped underground with four other teens, he has to face guilt, class differences, and the frightening possibility that something is hunting them.

Her best-known novel, The Grace Year, shifts into speculative fiction. In a society that banishes sixteen-year-old girls for a year in the wilderness, Tierney James must survive the wild, the people around her, and the rules meant to control her future. It became a New York Times bestseller and reached readers around the world.

Liggett has lived in New York for more than three decades and now resides in Paris, France. Across her work, she keeps returning to the same useful question: what happens when a young person sees the danger everyone else has learned to accept?