Nancy Farmer Books in Order

If you want her best-known dystopian story: The House of the Scorpion → The Lord of Opium
If you want Viking myth and big fantasy quests: The Sea of Trolls → The Land of the Silver Apples → The Islands of the Blessed
If you want survival fiction set in Africa: A Girl Named Disaster
If you want futuristic mystery with humor: The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm

Nancy Farmer was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1941 and grew up in Yuma on the Arizona-Mexico border. Her parents ran a worn, lively hotel, and from age nine she worked the front desk, listening to stories from railroad men, cowboys, drifters, and truck drivers. It was an unusual childhood, and you can feel that mix of danger, curiosity, and dark humor all through her fiction.

Books got her just as early. As a girl she roamed Yuma, ducked into the library, and read far beyond the children's shelves. She studied at Reed College in Portland and graduated in 1963, but a straight line from school to a settled career was never really her style.

Instead, she joined the Peace Corps and went to India. Later she worked in Berkeley, studied chemistry, and then headed to Africa, where she spent years in Mozambique and Zimbabwe doing scientific fieldwork, including water-weed monitoring and tsetse fly control. The landscapes, folklore, and daily life she knew there would later become the backbone of several books.

Science came first. Writing arrived later.

Farmer has said she started writing around forty, after her son was born and she had to step away from field science in Zimbabwe. Reading to him pushed her toward trying a story of her own. She taught herself by studying how adventure novels moved, how scenes held tension, and how characters stayed alive on the page. A win in the Writers of the Future contest helped her return to the United States and treat writing as real work, not just a side experiment.

Her first American book, Do You Know Me, drew on Zimbabwe. Then came The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, a futuristic Zimbabwe adventure that mixes mystery, satire, and street-level danger. A Girl Named Disaster follows a Mozambican girl on a brutal survival journey, and readers still love it for its grit, tenderness, and respect for spiritual life. Farmer doesn't write small, tidy worlds. Even her shortest books feel lived in.

Then The House of the Scorpion changed the scale of her audience.

That novel, and its sequel The Lord of Opium, imagine a harsh borderland where Matteo Alacran, the clone of a drug lord, has to figure out what being human really means. Many readers come to Farmer through those books because they are fast, unsettling, and full of moral pressure without ever sounding like homework. Others start with The Sea of Trolls and its sequels, where Viking history, myth, humor, and genuine peril all share the same boat.

Across her work, certain things keep showing up: children thrown into systems they did not build, strange settings rendered in practical detail, and hard questions about freedom, power, loyalty, and survival. She is just as interested in how people live day to day as in the big fantasy or science fiction idea. That is part of what makes her books memorable. The worlds are imaginative, but they also feel used, dusty, hungry, and real.

Farmer's shelf includes three Newbery Honor books, The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, A Girl Named Disaster, and The House of the Scorpion. The House of the Scorpion also won the National Book Award and received a Printz Honor. Later in life she settled with her husband, Harold, in Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains, which feels fitting for a writer who has always liked wild country, big stories, and a little edge around the corners.