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Max Gladstone Books in Order

Browse Max Gladstone books in order, with quick summaries, series guides, collaboration pages, and easy tips on where to start reading.

Last updated: July 8, 2026

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24 books

Three Parts Dead

by Max Gladstone

2012

A fire god has died, and young Craftswoman Tara Abernathy is hired to bring him back before his city collapses. Then she learns it was murder, and the case gets far more dangerous.

Two Serpents Rise

by Max Gladstone

2013

Risk manager Caleb Altemoc is sent to investigate demons in Dresediel Lex's water system. The job turns personal when his estranged father, a priest and revolutionary, is tied to the crisis.

A Kiss With Teeth

by Max Gladstone

2014

Vlad is a vampire trying to be a good husband and father in suburbia. When buried hunger returns, domestic life and monstrosity collide in a tense, darkly funny little nightmare.

Full Fathom Five

by Max Gladstone

2014

On Kavekana, Kai builds gods to order for paying clients. When one of her idols dies, she digs into why and uncovers a conspiracy that threatens both her work and her life.

The Angelus Guns

by Max Gladstone

2014

After her brother leaves for revolution in the Crystal City, Thea follows him into a war shaped by angels and stranger forces. Her search becomes a fierce, disorienting fight through a shattered world.

Badge, Book, and Candle

by Max Gladstone

2015

Detective Sal Brooks stumbles into a hidden war over dangerous magic when her brother disappears with the wrong book. The case drags her toward a secret Vatican-backed team that locks supernatural threats away.

Last First Snow

by Max Gladstone

2015

Years before the later Craft books, unrest shakes Dresediel Lex. Elayne Kevarian and Temoc try to hold the peace as protests, politics, and old wounds push the city toward catastrophe.

Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

2016

Magic hides in books and artifacts, and Team Three exists to contain it. When detective Sal Brooks joins the Vatican-backed squad, monster hunts and occult conspiracies become her new day job.

Creepy Town

by Max Gladstone

2016

Team Three is back, but the old rules are already failing. As new demonic trouble breaks out, the Bookburners have to work without their usual warning system and with fresh tension inside the group.

Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

2016

Alt Coulumb erupts in protests as creditors move against Kos Everburning's church. Tara Abernathy must defend the god she serves while old friends, old enemies, and bigger forces close in.

The Witch Who Came In From The Cold: Season One

by Max Gladstone

2016

In Prague in 1970, Cold War espionage is tangled up with an older magical conflict. A CIA officer and a KGB agent are drawn into the struggle from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.

Crispin's Model

by Max Gladstone

2017

An artist's orbit around the brilliant, troubling Crispin turns into a contemporary cosmic horror story. Art, obsession, and something vast and inhuman start bleeding into one another.

The Ruin of Angels

by Max Gladstone

2017

Kai Pohala arrives in occupied Agdel Lex to chase a business lead and reconnect with her sister, only to get pulled into a crime, a heist, and a city's buried ghosts.

The Scholast in the Low Waters Kingdom

by Max Gladstone

2017

A stranger falls into a kingdom on the brink of war and claims knowledge of worlds beyond its own. What follows is part court chronicle, part first contact story, and part political reckoning.

Fitting In

by Max Gladstone

2018

In a Wild Cards neighborhood story, everyday people find themselves pushed to act when pressure hits home. It's a street-level tale about community, local trouble, and unlikely courage.

The Ghost in the Shell

by Max Gladstone

2018

This comic anthology returns to Major Kusanagi and Section 9 for new cyberpunk operations. Different creative teams take the world in fresh directions while keeping the focus on identity, tech, and covert action.

Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

2019

Entrepreneur Vivian Liao is hurled into a far-future galaxy ruled by an all-powerful Empress. To get home, she has to cross impossible distances, gather unlikely allies, and challenge a cosmic empire.

This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Max Gladstone

2019

Two rival agents on opposite sides of a war across time begin leaving letters for each other. Their secret correspondence turns into love, and into a danger that could destroy them both.

Last Exit

by Max Gladstone

2022

Ten years after a college friend's fall into darkness shattered their group, Zelda is still on the road fighting monsters. Now the old crew must reunite before the rot they once failed to stop comes home.

Dead Country

by Max Gladstone

2023

Tara Abernathy returns to the village that drove her out to bury her father. What should have been a brief visit becomes the opening move in a much larger fight over power, faith, and the world's future.

The Witch Who Came In From The Cold: The Complete Season 2

by Max Gladstone

2023

Season two deepens the spycraft and occult politics as old loyalties fray and new players step in. The Prague setting stays tense, intimate, and full of double games.

Sleeper Straddle

by Walter Jon Williams

2024

This Wild Cards mosaic novel centers on Croyd Crenson, the Sleeper, after his latest transformation creates even more chaos than usual. The linked stories turn one unstable power into a sprawling caper.

Wicked Problems

by Max Gladstone

2024

Apocalypse is edging closer, and Tara Abernathy is partly to blame. While a girl and a god try to overturn the order of the world, Tara races to stop a disaster already in motion.

Dead Hand Rule

by Max Gladstone

2025

With the world cracking apart, the great powers gather in Alt Coulumb for a last chance at alliance. Tara must broker survival among gods, empires, and corporations that still do not trust one another.

Where should I start?

If you want the core fantasy world first: Three Parts DeadTwo Serpents RiseFull Fathom Five
If you want the story in world chronology: Last First SnowTwo Serpents RiseThree Parts DeadFour Roads Cross
If you want the newer endgame arc: Dead CountryWicked ProblemsDead Hand Rule
If you want a short, romantic science fiction entry: This Is How You Lose the Time War
If you want a standalone with bigger weirdness: Empress of Forever or Last Exit

Author bio

Max Gladstone is an American fantasy and science fiction writer whose books tend to start with an impossible system, then ask how ordinary people survive inside it. He first broke out with Three Parts Dead in 2012, and a lot of readers later found him through This Is How You Lose the Time War, the novella he wrote with Amal El-Mohtar.

Before the novels, there was Yale.

Gladstone studied Chinese literature there, then spent two years teaching in rural Anhui province in China. He also worked as a translator for a car magazine, which feels oddly on brand for a writer so interested in language, infrastructure, and the machinery behind everyday life.

He did plenty of other jobs before writing full time too: researcher, philosophy TA, editor, tech industry analyst, even Swiss Embassy tour guide. That range shows up in the fiction. His stories are full of contracts, institutions, utilities, and people trying to make giant systems do something decent for once.

The Craft Sequence is still the clearest example. Starting with Three Parts Dead and continuing through books like Full Fathom Five and Dead Country, Gladstone builds a world where gods can die, souls can work like currency, and lawyers, priests, and revolutionaries all end up arguing over who gets power and who pays the price. Readers who click with these books usually like the mix of sharp ideas, city-scale stakes, and characters who have to think as hard as they fight.

He likes changing scale.

This Is How You Lose the Time War takes a war across history and turns it into a fierce, intimate exchange of letters between rivals. Empress of Forever goes the other direction, all speed and size, with a far-future space opera built around Vivian Liao and a fight against an overwhelming empire. Then Last Exit brings the weird closer to home, following old friends, old failures, and monsters waiting on the American roadside.

There are patterns across all of it. Gladstone returns again and again to people caught between loyalty and freedom, to cities with long memories, and to systems that claim they are necessary even when they are plainly hurting someone. He also likes ensemble casts: negotiators, risk managers, spies, students, fighters, and exhausted professionals who would probably prefer a quiet day but never seem to get one.

He has also worked outside the usual novel form. Gladstone created Bookburners, co-created The Witch Who Came In From The Cold, and wrote interactive fiction in the Craft world with Choice of the Deathless and The City's Thirst. That collaborative streak makes sense. Even his solo books often feel like they know how groups talk, argue, improvise, and hold together under stress.

His official bio adds a few fitting details: he fences, plays fiddle, practices martial arts, has sung at Carnegie Hall, crashed a bicycle in Angkor Wat, and been thrown from a horse in Mongolia. These days he still moves between novels, games, and collaborations, usually with the same core interest in view: what power does to people, and what people can still do for one another inside broken worlds.

Edited by

Richard Reis

Software engineer whose passion for tracking book recommendations from podcasts inspired the creation of MRB.

Anurag Ramdasan

Lead investor at 3one4 Capital whose startup expertise and love for books helped shaped MRB and its growth.

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