Melinda Salisbury Books in Order

For dark court fantasy: The Sin Eater's Daughter → The Sleeping Prince → The Scarecrow Queen
For political fantasy with grief and intrigue: State of Sorrow → Song of Sorrow
For eerie standalone fantasy and horror: Hold Back the Tide → Her Dark Wings
For sharp, fast AI thrillers: EchoStar → AdelAIDE Just Wants to Help... → The Foundation → End Game
For folk horror with a small-town edge: Local Gods

Melinda Salisbury grew up in Coventry, in the West Midlands, in a working-class family that did not see publishing as a realistic career path. She has said that, as a kid on a housing estate getting free school dinners, she thought novels were written by people with money, connections, and a route into rooms that people like her were not expected to enter.

She still told stories anyway.

Fantasy was the natural home for that imagination. Long before she was published, she was building worlds, inventing court politics, and gravitating toward old myths, strange beliefs, death rituals, and the eerie corners of history. Those interests still shape her fiction. Even when she changes genre, there is usually something a little uncanny in the air.

For a while, writing sat beside ordinary working life. A careers adviser once pointed her toward office management, and she did in fact become an office manager. She kept reading, kept making stories, and slowly began to take the idea of writing more seriously, even if she still half-believed it was a life meant for other people.

Then she stopped waiting.

She spent two years writing a middle grade fantasy and sent it to agents. Claire Wilson liked the writing even though she did not love that first manuscript, and asked to see something else. The next something else was The Sin Eater's Daughter. Salisbury has described the moment that pushed her to go all in as a messy mix of a Harry Potter conference, a trip across the US to San Francisco, severe turbulence, a magic candle, and getting fired. Whatever the exact blend, it worked.

When The Sin Eater's Daughter arrived in 2015, it became the bestselling UK YA debut of the year. Readers who clicked with it tended to like the same things that still define her work now: dark atmosphere, strong emotional pressure, sharp questions about power, and young women trying to push back against roles they never chose. The trilogy continued with The Sleeping Prince and The Scarecrow Queen, plus the companion collection The Heart Collector.

She did not stay in one lane for long. The Sorrow duology, beginning with State of Sorrow, turned grief and court politics into a tense fantasy about responsibility and manipulation. Hold Back the Tide moved into colder, more folkloric territory in the Scottish Highlands, full of secrets and local fear. In Her Dark Wings, she reworked the Persephone story into something angrier, messier, and more interested in friendship, rage, and betrayal than tidy romance.

Across these books, certain threads keep returning. Salisbury writes a lot about girls and young women under pressure, about class, loyalty, grief, and the cost of being trapped inside other people's expectations. Her settings matter too. Whether the story is a palace, a mourning court, a remote town, or the edge of the Underworld, place is never just wallpaper. It presses on the characters and helps make their choices feel urgent.

More recently, she has written shorter, accessible tech thrillers such as EchoStar, AdelAIDE, The Foundation, and End Game. These books swap castles and curses for apps, influencers, AI, and bad actors in the tech world, but the question underneath is familiar: who has control, who is being manipulated, and what happens when adults build systems that young people have to survive. It is a smart fit for a writer so interested in power.

Salisbury now lives on the East Sussex coast. She is a four-time Carnegie nominated and bestselling author whose books have been published in sixteen countries, and alongside writing she works as a writing mentor and development editor, and volunteers at a local independent cinema. It feels like a fitting life for an author whose work is so interested in story, atmosphere, and the uneasy line between the everyday and the strange.