Paul Anthony Jones Books in Order

If you want the alien-apocalypse series first: Extinction Point → Exodus → Revelations → Genesis → Kings
If you want a bigger mystery adventure: The Paths Between Worlds → A Memory of Mankind → The Children of Tomorrow
If you want a stand-alone time-bending thriller: Toward Yesterday
If you want straight horror: The Darkening

Paul Antony Jones was born in Cardiff, Wales, and spent years writing before he ever published a novel. He worked as a newspaper reporter, wrote short fiction, and made a living as a commercial copywriter. That background matters when you read him. Even in his wildest setups, there is usually a practical, close-up sense of how people move through a room, carry fear around, or make bad choices when the pressure gets high.

Fiction came later.

By the time Toward Yesterday appeared in 2011, Jones had already been writing for more than 25 years. His path into novels was not the tidy version where someone writes in secret and suddenly breaks through. He came to fiction after years of professional writing, and you can feel that in the pace of his books. They tend to start with a strong hook, keep moving, and trust that one big speculative idea can carry a lot of human trouble behind it.

That first novel also says a lot about the kind of stories he liked to tell. Toward Yesterday takes a huge science fiction premise, the entire world thrown twenty-five years into the past, and treats it like both a disaster story and a personal one. Jones was drawn to the fallout of impossible events. Not just the concept itself, but what it would do to grief, memory, families, and everyday life once the shock wore off.

He liked pressure-cooker stories.

A year later came Extinction Point, the book that brought many readers to his work. It opens with a deadly red rain and follows reporter Emily Baxter as she realizes that surviving the first catastrophe only means facing the next one. Jones had a real taste for taking ordinary people and dropping them into situations that felt far too large for them. Emily is not introduced as a trained fighter or action hero. She is a working journalist who has to adapt because the world gives her no other option.

That series kept growing through Exodus, Revelations, Genesis, and Kings. What begins as lonely survival horror turns into a broader post-apocalyptic saga about alien change, small groups of survivors, and the question of whether humanity still has a place on its own planet. Readers who connect with these books usually point to the momentum. Jones liked to keep the pressure on, and he liked stories where every answer opened the door to a worse problem.

He did not stay in one lane, though. The Darkening leans harder into horror, while The Paths Between Worlds and A Memory of Mankind open into a stranger, more expansive kind of science fiction. Across those books, the same interests keep resurfacing: science, mystery, altered worlds, and battered people trying to keep hold of themselves while everything familiar falls apart. Even when the scale gets cosmic, the emotional engine is usually very simple. Somebody has to survive long enough to understand what is happening.

Jones described himself as a science geek, and he was known for reading scientific periodicals with real enthusiasm. He was also interested in the mysterious and the unexplained, which helps explain why his fiction sits so comfortably between hard-edged survival stories and bigger speculative ideas. His books often mix the nuts and bolts of survival with questions that have no easy answer. Why did this happen? Why this person? What comes next if the world cannot be put back the way it was?

Later in life, he lived near Las Vegas, Nevada, with his wife.

If you are new to his work, Extinction Point is the obvious place to start if you want a fast-moving alien apocalypse series. Toward Yesterday is a good entry point if you like time-bending disaster fiction. And if you want something more mysterious and adventurous, the This Alien Earth books show another side of his imagination. However you start, Jones tends to offer the same promise: a big idea, a hard road, and characters who have to keep going long after the world stops making sense.