Rae Carson Books in Order

For her signature epic fantasy: The Girl of Fire and Thorns → The Crown of Embers → The Bitter Kingdom
For a historical fantasy road trip: Walk on Earth a Stranger → Like a River Glorious → Into the Bright Unknown
If you finish Fire and Thorns and want more: The Girl of Fire and Thorns Stories → The Empire of Dreams
For a tense standalone: Any Sign of Life
For Star Wars tie-ins: Most Wanted → Canto Bight

Rae Carson was born in Oakland, California, and moved around a lot as a kid. That early life shows up in the way she writes people under pressure, people who have to adapt fast, read a room, and keep going. Long before she published a novel, she was already the kind of reader who treated a library trip like a mission.

Books got her early.

She has talked about sneaking out of class at eight years old to grab a new Nancy Drew book from the school library, then coming back late and blaming it on constipation. Years later, on the last day of eighth grade, a librarian gave her a beat-up book written by another Rae Carson. That was the moment the dream clicked into place. She didn’t just want to read books with her name on them. She wanted to write them.

Carson studied social science in college, with an emphasis in secondary education, and that background turned out to be useful in a surprising way. It gave her a lasting interest in history, religion, politics, and the forces that shape a country, all things that later became part of her fiction. Her biggest jump as a writer came when she joined an online critique group. The feedback was tough, but it pushed her to finish work, revise hard, and take the craft seriously.

She took the long road to the shelf.

Her debut novel, The Girl of Fire and Thorns, was the first book she ever finished. She wrote it in 2005, and at first it struggled to find the right place in the market. Later, when she rethought it as young adult fiction, the book sold quickly and became the start of the Fire and Thorns series, which grew into a New York Times bestselling series. Readers responded to Elisa, a heroine who is thoughtful, hungry, frightened, stubborn, funny, and much smarter than people expect. In The Crown of Embers and The Bitter Kingdom, Carson kept building that mix of court politics, faith, danger, and romance.

She followed that with the Gold Seer Trilogy, beginning with Walk on Earth a Stranger, a historical fantasy set during the Gold Rush. The book follows Lee Westfall, a girl who can sense gold and has to cross the country in disguise after her life is torn apart. It landed on the National Book Award longlist in 2015, and it shows another thing Carson does well: she can make a long, dangerous journey feel personal at every step. Whether she is writing desert kingdoms or wagon trails, she likes heroines who have to think their way through trouble.

That range shows up in her later work too. Any Sign of Life is a sharp, scary survival story that starts with a teenage girl waking up to find almost everyone around her dead. The Empire of Dreams returns to the world of Fire and Thorns through Red, another tough young woman trying to claim a place for herself. Carson has also written in the Star Wars universe, including Most Wanted and her story in Canto Bight, which makes sense once you know she started out writing what she jokingly called thinly disguised Star Wars fan fiction.

Across all of these books, some patterns keep showing up. Carson likes brave girls who are not fearless, settings that matter, and worlds shaped by power, class, belief, and survival. She writes adventure, yes, but she also writes about responsibility, found family, and the cost of growing up when history, or magic, or both, are pressing down on you.

She met her husband, science fiction writer C.C. Finlay, through the same online writing community that helped sharpen her work. These days she lives in Arizona with him. It feels fitting that a writer who spent so much time chasing stories through libraries and workshops now writes books for readers who like smart choices, hard journeys, and a little magic mixed in.