Liselle Sambury Books in Order

If you want futuristic witch fantasy: Blood Like Magic → Blood Like Fate
If you want dark academia and monsters: A Mastery of Monsters → A Clash of Carnivores
If you want standalone horror: Delicious Monsters → Tender Beasts
If you want a younger fantasy adventure: Lost in the Void

Liselle Sambury is a Trinidadian-Canadian author who writes speculative fiction for young readers, especially stories where fantasy, horror, and family drama all collide. She grew up in Toronto, Ontario, and she has said more than once that place matters to her, both as a writer and as a reader. Her books return again and again to dark themes, complicated relatives, and the small edge of hope that keeps people moving.

Toronto is not just a backdrop for her, it is part of the emotional weather.

As a kid, Sambury spent a lot of time telling herself stories. In interviews, she has said she grew up as an only child surrounded by adults, got bored easily, and built worlds in her head to pass the time. She also found comfort in reading widely, from library books to the darker fantasy that pulled her in as a teen. Writing, for her, became both an outlet and a distraction, a way to vent feelings and disappear into a different world when real life felt heavy.

At Queen's University she studied linguistics, and she also found a more serious writing education through creative writing classes and workshop critique. The path to publication was not neat. She finished one novel in her teens, wrote another in her early twenties, and learned from both of them when they did not sell. In 2017, while working in Northern Ontario, she drafted a new manuscript during NaNoWriMo, then revised it hard, shared it with trusted readers, and kept polishing until it was ready for agents. That mix of persistence and self-editing turned out to matter.

That third try became Blood Like Magic.

Published in 2021, Blood Like Magic introduced readers to Voya Thomas, a teen witch in a near-future Toronto who is told she must kill her first love to save her family's magic. The sequel, Blood Like Fate, widens that story into something bigger, with leadership struggles, community tension, and the fallout from impossible choices. Those books also show a lot of what Sambury does well: technology woven into magic, Trinidadian-Canadian family history treated as living presence, and a heroine forced to sort through duty, desire, and pressure from every direction. Blood Like Magic went on to become a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Awards.

She later moved into horror with Delicious Monsters, a haunted, two-timeline novel set between Toronto and northern Ontario, and then Tender Beasts, a murder story wrapped around grief, wealth, and the uglier secrets of a powerful family. Both books lean into the things Sambury clearly likes to explore: mothers and daughters, family myths, intergenerational damage, and the way a house or landscape can seem to keep score. Even when ghosts or gore show up, the emotional core stays close to the characters.

Her range is easy to see in A Mastery of Monsters, which brings dark academia, secret societies, and monstrous transformations into the picture, and in Lost in the Void, her middle grade adventure set in the world of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Different age group, different sandbox, same interest in characters under pressure. She keeps returning to hidden histories, messy loyalties, and the question of what people owe the families and communities that shaped them.

These days, alongside writing novels, Sambury shares practical advice for aspiring authors and talks openly about the publishing process on YouTube. Recent interviews have also placed her in Timmins, Ontario, and that part of the province has already fed into her fiction. Her stories may feature witches, ghosts, monsters, and alternate worlds, but what makes them stick is how human they feel underneath all that strangeness.