Michael Northrop Books in Order

If you want ancient-Egypt adventure: Book of the Dead → Amulet Keepers → Valley of Kings → The Stone Warriors → The Final Kingdom
If you like dark survival stories: Trapped → Surrounded By Sharks → Polaris
If you want sports and real-life middle grade: Plunked → On Thin Ice
If you want funny DC graphic novels: Dear Justice League → Dear DC Super-Villains → Teen Titans Go!: Undead?! → Young Alfred: Pain in the Butler

Michael Northrop grew up in Salisbury, Connecticut, a small town in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains. He has said it was a true small-town upbringing, and that sense of close circles, long memories, and limited escape routes shows up again and again in his fiction. He now lives in New York City.

Books were not the easy road for him.

Northrop has shared that he is dyslexic and repeated second grade, which makes his later career as a writer feel a little stubborn in the best way. After graduating from NYU, he spent 12 years at Sports Illustrated for Kids, including five years as baseball editor. He also wrote for magazines and journals, with work appearing in places like Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated for Kids, The New York Times Upfront, Dance Magazine, Notre Dame Review, McSweeney's, and Weird Tales.

That mix of magazine work, sports, and fiction mattered.

Northrop once described an early split in his writing life: literary fiction for adults on his own time, sports articles for kids at work. Writing young adult fiction gave him a way to bring those two sides together. It did not happen all at once. He wrote an early novel that he later called a mess, started over, wrote another manuscript that did not sell, and kept going until Gentlemen broke through.

That debut novel still tells you a lot about what he does well. Gentlemen follows a group of boys who begin to suspect their English teacher knows more than he should about a missing friend, and the story keeps tightening as fear, class tension, and loyalty twist together. Readers who like Northrop often respond to that feeling of ordinary kids getting in too deep, with no clean way out.

His next book, Trapped, widened his audience. A handful of teens stranded in a high school during a brutal blizzard gave him the perfect pressure-cooker setup, and he used it to write a survival story that is really about stress, group dynamics, and the bad decisions people make when they are cold and scared. Later books kept changing shape. Plunked turns a Little League beanball into a story about fear and pride. Rotten pairs a guarded teen with a rescued Rottweiler. Surrounded By Sharks and Polaris push younger characters into survival situations where nerve matters as much as strength.

He likes putting young characters under pressure and seeing what holds.

For middle grade readers, Northrop took a big swing with Book of the Dead, the first novel in his five-book TombQuest series. Those books follow Alex and Ren through mummies, Death Walkers, lost spells, and afterlife chaos rooted in ancient Egyptian mythology. The series became a bestseller, and it showed another side of his writing: he can handle big adventure and fast pacing without losing the small human stuff that makes the danger land.

He has also had a lot of fun in comics. In Dear Justice League and Dear DC Super-Villains, kids write to heroes and villains and get funny, oddly revealing answers back. Teen Titans Go!: Undead?! leans into zombie comedy, while Young Alfred: Pain in the Butler imagines Batman's future butler as a nervous schoolboy who stumbles into a mystery. Even when the setting changes, Northrop tends to come back to the same things, embarrassment, courage, loyalty, and the ways kids try to keep their dignity when life gets weird.

Today he writes from New York City. Across novels and graphic novels, his books have sold more than a million copies. That feels fitting for a writer whose stories move quickly, but still leave room for jokes, worry, and the small choices that show who a person really is.