Nadine Brandes Books in Order

Nadine Brandes is a Carol Award-winning writer of young adult fantasy and science fiction. Her books include A Time to Die, Fawkes, Romanov, Wishtress, and The Nightmare Virus, and they tend to pair big speculative ideas with very personal questions about courage, calling, and what a life is for.

Writing showed up early.

She learned her alphabet with a fountain pen in kindergarten and started journaling at nine. She has said she never really decided to become a writer. It felt necessary to her from the start, less like a hobby and more like part of how she moved through the world.

For a long time, though, she thought her future would be speech therapy. In college she studied the field because of her disabled older brother, who died before she met him, and she later continued into graduate school in Missouri. All through those years she kept writing, spent long hours in coffee shops, and learned to take hard editorial feedback without giving up.

That tension shaped her path.

Brandes has written that the idea for A Time to Die hit after the sudden death of a young man she knew of through friends and family. She found herself stuck on one question, how would you live if you knew the day you would die? That became the engine of the Out of Time trilogy, which follows Parvin Blackwater in a future where every person has a Clock that marks the date of death. She began drafting the series in 2010, sold it to Enclave Publishing after years of conferences and revisions, and later signed with an agent she had also met through the writing conference world.

From there, her fiction widened in scope but kept the same interest in bold choices under pressure. Fawkes turns the Gunpowder Plot into a historical fantasy about a boy with a stone plague and impossible loyalties. Romanov reimagines Anastasia's story with magic, exile, and danger closing in from every side.

Wishtress leans into fairy tale territory, following a girl whose tears become wishes and whose next tear could kill her. The Nightmare Virus swings back toward science fiction, with dream technology gone wrong and a boy racing for a cure before sleep becomes a prison. Readers who move across Brandes's books usually find the same mix of high stakes, clear emotion, and characters forced to choose what they will sacrifice.

Her themes are consistent.

She likes brave but frightened protagonists, strange worlds with firm rules, and stories that ask what hope, freedom, sacrifice, and peace really cost. Even when the setup is fantastical, the emotional core stays close to home. Off the page, she brings plenty of personality too. She has spent four days as a sea cook for research, loves chai and Oreos, and happily describes herself as a Harry Potter super-nerd. These days, she shares family life with her husband and their four children, and she has also said they are building a tiny house on wheels.