Paula PJ Brackston Books in Order

If you want the main witch story: The Witch's Daughter / The Book of Shadows → The Return of the Witch
If you want magical antiques and time travel: The Little Shop of Found Things → Secrets of the Chocolate House → The Garden of Promises and Lies → City of Time and Magic
If you want funny fantasy mysteries: Once Upon a Crime → Gretel and the Case of the Missing Frog Prints → The Case of the Fickle Mermaid → The Sorcerer's Appendix
If you want a standalone witch novel: The Winter Witch → The Midnight Witch → The Silver Witch
If you want Welsh legend and big romantic fantasy: Lamp Black, Wolf Grey → The Witch's Knight

Paula PJ Brackston was born in Dorset, England, and moved to Wales when she was five. She has described herself as a mountain child, raised with more space than money, and with long stretches of outdoor freedom that left plenty of room for imagination.

She and her brother would sit on rocky outcrops with binoculars, watching the valley below and making up stories about what they saw. That early habit of turning landscape into narrative never really left her, and it helps explain why place feels so important in her fiction.

She was inventing stories early.

Before writing became her main job, Brackston worked all over the place. She has been a travel agent, a secretary, an English teacher, a stud groom, and a goat herd. Later she returned to Wales, settled with her family, and spent years raising children in a remote off-grid farmhouse while writing her first books.

The route into publishing was steady rather than sudden. She spent nine years submitting work, learning on the job, selling short stories, and earning an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University before her first novel found a home. That book began life as Book of Shadows, was later revised into The Witch's Daughter, and went on to become the breakthrough that put her on the bestseller list.

A lot of readers meet her through Elizabeth Hawksmith, the near-immortal witch at the center of The Witch's Daughter and The Return of the Witch. Those books move between centuries, mixing magic, love, fear, and the weight of a very long memory. But Brackston rarely stays in one lane for long. The Winter Witch heads into nineteenth-century Wales for a quieter, more intimate story of marriage, rumor, and buried power, while The Midnight Witch shifts to London society and secret covens, and The Silver Witch brings grief, prophecy, and a Welsh lake together in a more haunted mood.

Another clear thread in her work is her love of old places and old legends. In The Little Shop of Found Things, antiques carry people back through time, and in Lamp Black, Wolf Grey she folds Merlin into a modern Welsh story. She has also written the comic Brothers Grimm detective books as P. J. Brackston, turning Gretel into a weary private investigator in eighteenth-century Bavaria.

Place comes first in her work.

Again and again, her books return to women learning what their power costs, landscapes that seem to remember what happened on them, and the way love can complicate duty instead of solving it. Even when the tone changes, from eerie to funny to romantic, those interests stay in view.

Now Brackston lives with her family in Hereford, in the Wye Valley border country. She has written about working in a creaky Victorian house with an odd writing room at the top, and about going out for long walks with the dog through country full of old paths and old stories. That feels like exactly the right home base for a writer who keeps listening for what the past has left behind.