Lana Harper Books in Order

Lana Harper was born in Serbia and spent parts of her childhood in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria before moving to the United States. That early life, moving between countries and languages, helps explain why setting matters so much in her fiction. Her books love places with their own weather, rituals, and rules, whether that means a hidden magical town or a more shadowy corner of history.

She came to fiction by way of publishing.

Harper studied psychology and literature at Yale, then law at Boston University, then publishing at Emerson College. At Emerson, she discovered literary agenting and saw it as a perfect middle ground, a job close to storytelling that also made use of her legal training. She started interning at agencies in Boston, built a client list, and eventually spent years working as a literary agent before shifting her focus to her own work.

While she was still agenting, she began publishing young adult novels under the name Lana Popović. Books like Wicked Like a Wildfire, Fierce Like a Firestorm, Blood Countess, and Poison Priestess already carried a lot of the things readers now connect with her: witches, dangerous beauty, queer undercurrents, family tension, and women trying to define themselves on their own terms. She has said that relationships between women, in family, friendship, and romance, are what interest her most, and that thread runs through nearly everything she writes.

Witches, basically, are her brand.

After about seven years as an agent, Harper moved into writing full-time in 2018. The shift from YA to adult fiction came soon after. She has said she wanted room to write older characters, messier romantic lives, and queer love stories that could be sexy, funny, and emotionally complicated without having to sand down the edges for a younger audience.

That change led to Payback's a Witch, her adult debut and the opening book in the Thistle Grove series. She started building that world in 2020, imagining a magical small town that felt like a bright spot during a bleak stretch of time. The result was a cozy, sharp-tongued romance full of revenge plotting, hometown baggage, and fall atmosphere, and it helped make her a New York Times bestselling author.

The books that followed, From Bad to Cursed, Back in a Spell, In Charm's Way, and Rise and Divine, keep returning to the same town from different angles. Readers tend to come for the spellwork, festivals, and queer romance, then stay for the family mess, old grudges, and characters who are often a little bruised but still very funny. Harper likes interconnected casts, so side characters rarely stay on the sidelines for long.

What makes her work stand out is not big, distant fantasy so much as lived-in magic. Her stories make room for grief, memory, loyalty, desire, and the awkward business of becoming an adult without leaving your past behind. Even when monsters or demons show up, the emotional problem is usually human first.

She lives in Chicago with her family, and her official bio notes that she spends much of her time plotting witchy stories and equally witchy tattoos. That sounds like a pretty fair summary of the work, too.