Leslye Walton Books in Order

If you want her signature magical realism: The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
If you prefer darker, witchier suspense: The Price Guide to the Occult
If you want to read everything in order: The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender → The Price Guide to the Occult

Leslye Walton is a Pacific Northwest writer through and through. Born in the region and raised in Tacoma, Washington, she writes the kind of stories where rain, coastlines, family history, and a hint of the uncanny all feel perfectly at home together.

Her path to fiction was not especially tidy. Walton studied education at Pacific Lutheran University, planning for a practical career in the classroom, and only near the end of college did writing push its way to the front. While finishing her student teaching, she was driving home, listening to a Colin Hay song, when the character Viviane Lavender arrived so clearly that Walton pulled over to sketch out the idea.

That spark turned into a short story, and the short story helped her get into the MFA program in creative writing at Portland State University. During graduate school, the story grew outward, gathering generations, secrets, and the girl who would become Ava Lavender. Afterward, she taught language arts to middle school students in Tacoma and then Seattle while working toward publication.

It changed everything.

Walton's debut novel, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, was published in 2014. It follows a family haunted by foolish love and centers on Ava, a teenage girl born with wings, but the book is about more than its strange premise. Readers tend to connect with its mix of family saga, first love, grief, and danger, all grounded in a version of Seattle that feels wet, lived-in, and a little haunted.

The book gave Walton a strong start. It was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award and won both a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award and a PEN Center USA Literary Award. Those honors fit the book, but so does the simpler fact that it found a loyal readership among teens and adults who like their realism touched by myth.

Her second novel, The Price Guide to the Occult, arrived in 2018 and kept one foot in the same rainy landscape while moving deeper into dark fantasy. Its heroine, Nor Blackburn, wants a normal life on Anathema Island, but a family curse, a sinister spell book, and the threat of her own mother make normal impossible. If Ava Lavender feels like a multigenerational fairy tale, The Price Guide to the Occult is sharper, colder, and more openly witchy.

Across both books, Walton returns to a few things again and again: young women trying to understand who they are, families carrying old damage into the present, and love that can heal or wound depending on who's holding it. Her stories are full of mood, but they are also very character-centered. She has said her writing is driven by character first, and that shows. Even at their strangest, her books stay close to questions teenagers know well: Where do I belong, what do I inherit, and how do I become myself?

She's also still a teacher at heart.

Official biographies say Walton lives in Seattle, where she teaches middle-school students to read and write, and, just as importantly to her, to be kind to one another. That balance of imagination and everyday care feels central to her work. She has also shared a few details that feel nicely in tune with her books: she loves moonlit working hours, lives with a Chihuahua named Mr. Darcy and a cat named Griff, and seems perfectly happy letting the weird sit right next to the ordinary.