Laini Taylor Books in Order

If you want star-crossed fantasy romance: Daughter of Smoke and Bone → Days of Blood and Starlight → Dreams of Gods and Monsters
If you want lost cities and dream magic: Strange the Dreamer → Muse of Nightmares
If you want a younger, faster quest fantasy: Blackbringer → Silksinger
If you want shorter side reads: Lips Touch → Night of Cake & Puppets

Laini Taylor was born in Chico, California, and grew up moving around as a military kid, spending time in California and Europe. That restless, in-between feeling never seems far from her books. Again and again she writes about characters with one foot in an ordinary world and the other in a stranger one, still trying to figure out where home really is.

She studied English at UC Berkeley, but the jump from wanting to write to actually finishing a book took a while. Taylor has said she always wanted to be a writer, yet she was 35 before she completed her first novel. Before novels took over, she was making art, thinking visually, and working with her husband, illustrator Jim Di Bartolo, on the graphic novel The Drowned.

It took time, and that matters.

Her debut novel, Blackbringer, introduced readers to the Dreamdark world, a place of faeries, devils, crows, and old magic. It already showed a lot of what would become familiar in her work: girls who are tougher than they look, monsters with inner lives, and high stakes balanced with humor. Not long after that came Lips Touch: Three Times, a trio of supernatural love stories that became a National Book Award finalist.

A lot of readers first found Taylor through Daughter of Smoke and Bone. The book begins with Karou, a blue-haired art student in Prague who runs strange errands for the chimaera who raised her, then opens into a much larger story about angels, war, memory, and mercy. Readers tend to remember the mix of sharp banter, real emotion, and a fantasy world that feels both huge and weirdly intimate.

She likes dreamers, outsiders, and people with impossible jobs.

That line runs straight into Strange the Dreamer and Muse of Nightmares, the duology about librarian Lazlo Strange and the lost city of Weep. These books are full of libraries, gods, ghosts, moths, and dreams, but underneath the myth they are still about hurt people deciding whether to pass that hurt onward. Strange the Dreamer earned a Printz Honor, and it is easy to see why so many readers point to it when they want Taylor at her most sweeping.

Across her work, certain themes keep resurfacing. Found family matters. So does the question of what makes a monster, and whether love or mercy can interrupt patterns of violence. Her settings do a lot of work too. Prague, hidden forests, impossible citadels, and cities buried under story are not just backdrops in her fiction. They shape the characters and the choices they believe they can make.

Taylor lives in Portland, Oregon, with Jim Di Bartolo and their daughter, Clementine. She is still clearly interested in collaboration as well as prose. In 2023 she and Di Bartolo released Billie Blaster and the Robot Army from Outer Space, a middle grade graphic novel that swaps epic sorrow for wild comedy, while keeping the same fondness for oddball imagination and bighearted stakes.