Natasha Ngan Books in Order

If you want the core fantasy story: Girls of Paper and Fire → Girls of Storm and Shadow → Girls of Fate and Fury
If you want palace intrigue and forbidden romance first: Girls of Paper and Fire
If you want her earlier dystopian science fiction: The Elites → The Memory Keepers
If you want a standalone to sample her style: The Memory Keepers

Natasha Ngan was born in St Albans, England, and grew up between the UK and Malaysia, where her mother's family is from. That back-and-forth matters to her books. Again and again, she writes about characters who live between worlds, who do not neatly fit the rules around them, and who have to build a self out of mixed loyalties, mixed histories, and hard choices.

That in-between feeling became part of her storytelling.

She studied Geography at the University of Cambridge, and during her time there the idea that became The Elites started to take shape. After graduation, she worked at a social media agency in London and later as a fashion blogger, social media consultant, and freelance writer. Those jobs sat alongside her early writing years, when she was learning how to build a career book by book.

She has also taught yoga.

Her first novels, The Elites and The Memory Keepers, lean into science fiction. The Elites drops readers into Neo-Babel, the last surviving city in a damaged future world, and follows Silver as politics, family secrets, and loyalty collide. The Memory Keepers moves to a futuristic London where memories can be stolen, traded, and replayed. Readers who pick up these books usually find big ideas wrapped in quick pacing, emotional stakes, and young protagonists trying to work out who they can trust.

Then came Girls of Paper and Fire, the book that brought Ngan to a much wider audience and became a New York Times bestseller. Set in the kingdom of Ikhara, it follows Lei, a girl from the lowest caste, after she is taken to serve the Demon King and falls for another Paper Girl, Wren. The sequel Girls of Storm and Shadow opens the world beyond the palace walls, and Girls of Fate and Fury brings the trilogy to its end. Taken together, the three books mix court danger, rebellion, romance, and survival in a way that keeps the focus on the girls at the center.

The trilogy also shows how openly Ngan draws on her own background. She has spoken about growing up mixed-race, Chinese-Malaysian and English, and about feeling both connected to and slightly outside the communities around her. In Girls of Paper and Fire, she pulled more fully from Chinese and Malaysian history and mythology, using them to shape Ikhara's cultures, power structures, and demons. The result is fantasy that feels lush and specific without losing sight of the people inside it.

Across all of her books, some patterns keep returning. Ngan is interested in power, class, memory, violence, desire, and what it takes to stay soft in a harsh world. Her characters are often young women or outsiders caught inside rigid systems. There is usually a love story somewhere in the middle, but it never floats free of the larger stakes. The romance has to survive pressure, fear, and the mess of real life.

These days, she lives in Marsilly, France, with her partner, after moving from Paris to be closer to the sea. That feels like a fitting detail for a writer whose work is so often about movement, distance, and crossing from one life into another. Even when her settings are invented, her stories keep one foot in the real world, especially in the questions they ask about belonging, freedom, and the cost of change.