Nick Harkaway Books in Order
Explore Nick Harkaway books in order, with quick summaries, series guides, and where to start with his sci-fi, noir, Doctor Who, and Smiley fiction.
Last updated: June 10, 2026
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Publication Order
19 books
The Gone-Away World
by Nick Harkaway
2008
After a weapon tears reality apart, an unnamed survivor and his friend fight through a warped postwar landscape of monsters, mimes, and unstable memories. It is funny, chaotic, and surprisingly tender beneath all the wreckage.
Angelmaker
by Nick Harkaway
2012
Joe Spork wants a quiet life fixing clocks, not a return to his gangster family’s mess. Then a strange mechanism wakes an old doomsday plot, and Joe is pulled into a dangerous London chase with retired spy Edie Banister.
Edie Investigates
by Nick Harkaway
2012
When a decapitated man turns up in Shrewton, junior Treasury man Tom Rice and retired spy Edie Banister circle the same mystery from different angles. The result is a brisk murder story with espionage shadows and dry humor.
The Blind Giant
by Nick Harkaway
2012
In this nonfiction book, Harkaway looks at how digital life reshapes attention, identity, and everyday behavior. It is personal, curious, and practical about staying human while technology keeps changing the rules around us.
The Death Pit
by Joanne M Harris
2013
A *Doctor Who* short story featuring the Fourth Doctor. In this creepy tale, the Doctor encounters a strange and deadly golf hotel where something lurks beneath the sand. Part of the *Time Trips* collection.
A Handful of Stardust
by Joanne M Harris
2014
A *Doctor Who* short story featuring the Sixth Doctor and Peri. They visit a library planet where the greatest mathematicians are dying under mysterious circumstances. Part of the *Time Trips* collection.
Into the Nowhere
by Joanne M Harris
2014
A *Doctor Who* short story featuring the Eleventh Doctor and Clara. They land on an unknown planet where the Doctor must face a mystery in the dark. Part of the *Time Trips* anthology.
Keeping Up with the Joneses
by Joanne M Harris
2014
A *Doctor Who* short story featuring the Tenth Doctor. The Doctor finds himself in a bed-and-breakfast run by a suspicious couple with a very strange secret. Part of the *Time Trips* collection.
Salt of the Earth
by Joanne M Harris
2014
A *Doctor Who* adventure featuring the Third Doctor and Jo Grant. They travel to Australia in the near future and encounter strange salt statues on a remote island. Part of the *Time Trips* collection.
The Anti-Hero
by Joanne M Harris
2014
A *Doctor Who* adventure featuring the Second Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe. They arrive in ancient Alexandria and face a villain who knows their future. Part of the *Time Trips* anthology.
The Bog Warrior
by Joanne M Harris
2014
Cecelia Ahern's own contribution to the *Doctor Who* universe. The Tenth Doctor lands in the Kingdom of Cashel and gets involved in a bizarre masked ball with a missing prince. A whimsical tale from the *Time Trips* series.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller
by Joanne M Harris
2014
A *Doctor Who* short story featuring the Third Doctor. The Doctor finds himself trapped in a surreal town where time behaves strangely and nothing is quite what it seems. Part of the *Time Trips* collection.
Tigerman
by Nick Harkaway
2014
Near retirement, Sergeant Lester Ferris is posted to polluted, doomed Mancreu and told to keep his head down. His friendship with a comic-book-mad boy pulls him into violence, secrets, and a very human question about what makes a hero.
Gnomon
by Nick Harkaway
2017
In a hyper-surveilled near future, inspector Mielikki Neith investigates the death of Diana Hunter in custody. The case opens into nested lives, coded memories, and a dizzying puzzle about power, freedom, and who controls reality.
The Price You Pay
by Nick Harkaway
2018
Jack Price treats cocaine dealing like a logistics business, until someone murders his neighbor and hires the Seven Demons to kill him. Jack answers with a savage, darkly funny revenge campaign that tears through the criminal world.
Seven Demons
by Nick Harkaway
2021
Jack Price and his lethal crew finally land a job, a supposedly impossible bank heist with a huge payoff. Naturally, it turns into betrayal, bloodshed, and the kind of chaos Jack is almost built to survive.
Titanium Noir
by Nick Harkaway
2023
Detective Cal Sounder is called to investigate the murder of a Titan, one of the towering, near-immortal elites created by T7 therapy. What looks impossible soon turns into a sharp noir about wealth, bodies, and power.
Karla's Choice
by Nick Harkaway
2024
In 1963, retired George Smiley is pulled back toward the Circus after a Soviet defection and a missing man unsettle London. Harkaway places him in a taut Cold War puzzle that leads toward his long rivalry with Karla.
Sleeper Beach
by Nick Harkaway
2025
A dead woman washes up in a tired seaside town, and Cal Sounder is hired to find out what happened. The case pulls him into family money, labor unrest, and the uneasy reality of life around the Titans.
Where should I start?
If you want the big, strange debut: The Gone-Away World
If you want clockwork London adventure: Angelmaker
If you want a brainy surveillance puzzle: Gnomon
If you want hard-boiled sci-fi noir: Titanium Noir → Sleeper Beach
If you want savage crime comedy: The Price You Pay → Seven Demons
Author bio
Nick Harkaway was born Nicholas Cornwell in Cornwall in 1972 and moved to London while still a child. He grew up in North London, studied at Clare College, Cambridge, and came of age around books, argument, and ideas, but his own route into fiction was not neat or quick.
Before the novels, there were years of screenwriting.
After university he worked in the film industry and spent about nine years as a paid but unproduced scriptwriter, which he has described as a deeply frustrating stretch. During that period he kept writing, and when he finished the manuscript that became The Gone-Away World, he sent it to an agent under a pen name rather than lean on the family name.
That first novel, published in 2008, told readers a lot about what he liked to do. The Gone-Away World is a post-apocalyptic war story, a friendship novel, a bureaucratic nightmare, and a very odd joke, all at once. Harkaway likes books that move fast, think hard, and leave room for absurdity, and his debut does exactly that.
Angelmaker followed with gangsters, clockwork machinery, and the retired spy Edie Banister, while Tigerman narrowed the focus to a soldier, a doomed island, and a boy who loves comic books. Readers who warm to Harkaway usually respond to that mix of play and pressure. The settings may be wild, but the human stakes stay close: friendship, loyalty, compromise, and the question of how decent people live inside broken systems.
He likes big systems, but he never forgets the people trapped inside them.
That concern runs through The Blind Giant, his nonfiction book about digital life, and through Gnomon, his huge surveillance-state puzzle about memory, control, and freedom. Later, Titanium Noir showed another side of him again, a leaner book with a hard-boiled detective at its center and a science-fiction idea about wealth written straight onto the human body. Even when the genre changes, the recurring interests do not: power, identity, class, technology, and the stories people tell themselves to keep going.
He has also written crime novels as Aidan Truhen, including The Price You Pay and Seven Demons. Those books are meaner, funnier, and much dirtier on the page, but they still share his fascination with status, commerce, and the mess people make when they start treating violence like a business model.
In 2024 he published Karla's Choice, stepping into George Smiley's world after earlier helping bring his father David Cornwell's final unpublished novel, Silverview, to publication in 2021. That move surprised some readers because Harkaway had spent years building his own strange corners of science fiction, noir, and satire. But the fit makes sense once you know his work: he has long been interested in bureaucracy, moral pressure, secrecy, and the damage institutions do to ordinary lives.
He lives in London with his wife Clare, their two children, and, as his official biography puts it, a very needy dog. His books can be loud, intricate, and very funny, but underneath the noise they keep coming back to a few solid questions: who holds power, who pays for it, and how much of yourself you can keep when the world gets strange.
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