Na’amen Gobert Tilahun Books in Order

Na’amen Gobert Tilahun is a fantasy writer, essayist, bookseller, and freelance critic whose work grows out of two places at once: Los Angeles and the Bay Area. He split his early years between Los Angeles and San Francisco, then later lived around the Bay Area, including San Francisco, Redwood City, San Jose, and Oakland.

Place matters in his work.

Before his novels arrived, he was already writing across forms. His fiction, poetry, and critical essays appeared online, and he also co-created and co-hosted the geek podcast The Adventures of Yellow Peril & Magical Negro. That mix of books, pop culture, criticism, and humor still feels like a good map for what he does on the page.

His debut novel, The Root, came out in 2016 and opened the Wrath & Athenaeum trilogy. It follows Erik in San Francisco and Lil in the mirror city of Zebub, pulling together gods, secret agencies, buried history, and a threat large enough to swallow whole worlds. The book landed on the American Library Association's 2017 Rainbow Book List, and readers who connected with it often pointed to the queer cast, the scale of the worldbuilding, and the way the city itself feels charged.

The story grows outward from there. The Tree pushes deeper into Corpiliu and widens the political and emotional stakes, while The Fruit carries the trilogy toward its ending without dropping the messy personal damage that made the first book work. Even at its biggest, the series stays interested in grief, loyalty, anger, and the cost of power.

Comics are in there too.

Tilahun has spoken about how much superhero stories mattered to him growing up. He remembered trips to a comic shop in San Mateo, where his stepfather would turn him loose with a little money and he would come home with armfuls of cheap-bin comics. That background helps explain why his fantasy often thinks in terms of powers, sacrifice, team dynamics, and ordinary people being asked to carry impossible stakes.

His path to publication was not especially tidy. He has said that an editor liked the early idea behind what became the trilogy and asked to see a manuscript before one fully existed. Tilahun ended up racing to finish The Root while working two jobs, which feels oddly right for a writer whose books move with a lot of urgency.

Another major thread in his work is religion, or maybe the argument between belief, history, and power. In college he minored in Judaism for a time, later identified as an atheist, and focused part of his schooling on comparative religions. You can feel that background in the trilogy's interest in gods, sects, bloodlines, erased histories, and the way sacred stories get used by people who want control.

On his own blog, he has written about building fantasy worlds in motion rather than planning every inch of them in advance, asking questions about landscape, government, religion, and survival as he goes. That practical, curious approach suits the books. They are full of monsters, alternate worlds, and looming catastrophe, but also family pressure, queer life, memory, and the ways whole communities get pushed aside. San Francisco is never just scenery in his fiction. It is memory, argument, and emotional weather, all at once.