Ransom Riggs Books in Order

If you want his signature dark fantasy: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children → Hollow City → Library of Souls.
If you want to continue Jacob’s journey: A Map of Days → The Conference of the Birds → The Desolations of Devil's Acre.
If you love worldbuilding extras: Tales of the Peculiar → Miss Peregrine's Museum of Wonders → Miss Peregrine's Journal for Peculiar Children.
If you prefer a completely new story world: The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry.
If you like nonfiction and found photos: The Sherlock Holmes Handbook → Talking Pictures.

Ransom Riggs is an American writer and filmmaker best known for creating the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series, where haunting found photographs share the page with a dark, adventurous coming of age story.

He was born on February 3, 1979, on a centuries old farm in Maryland, then grew up in southern Florida. With limited TV and not much nearby, he spent long afternoons reading, exploring outside and inventing stories to entertain himself.

In high school he attended Pine View School for the Gifted, a place full of other kids who loved ideas and odd obsessions. There he kept writing, shooting homemade movies with friends and beginning to see that stories might be more than just a hobby.

Stories and images were already starting to braid together in his head.

Riggs went on to study English literature at Kenyon College in Ohio. Surrounded by other bookish students, he learned to take his own fiction seriously while also feeding a lifelong love of classic detective tales, ghost stories and offbeat humor.

After college he moved to Los Angeles and earned a graduate degree in film from the University of Southern California. Film school sharpened his eye for visual storytelling, and he spent his early career making short films, editing videos and writing essays and travel pieces for a trivia magazine.

Those side projects led to his first book, The Sherlock Holmes Handbook, a playful guide to the methods of the famous detective. Around the same time he started haunting flea markets and swap meets, collecting anonymous vintage snapshots that felt strange, funny or quietly eerie.

Out of that box of photographs came the idea for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Instead of treating the images as simple illustrations, he built the story around them: a boy named Jacob follows clues in his grandfather’s old pictures to a mysterious orphanage on a Welsh island and discovers a hidden world of time loops and peculiars with unusual abilities.

The novel became a bestseller and grew into a six book sequence that follows Jacob and his peculiar friends across wartime Britain, the decaying slums of Devil’s Acre and, later, a rougher, less regulated American peculiardom in Hollow City, Library of Souls, A Map of Days, The Conference of the Birds and The Desolations of Devil’s Acre. A feature film adaptation directed by Tim Burton introduced Miss Peregrine and her peculiar children to an even wider audience.

Alongside the main saga, Riggs has expanded the universe with story collections and guidebooks like Tales of the Peculiar, Miss Peregrine’s Museum of Wonders and Miss Peregrine’s Journal for Peculiar Children. He has also returned to his photography obsession in Talking Pictures, which pairs old snapshots with the handwritten notes on their backs, and launched a new contemporary fantasy series with Sunderworld, Vol. I: The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry.

Across all of this work, certain themes repeat: kids who feel out of place, found families, the weight of history and the way small, strange objects can open doors to bigger worlds. Riggs lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife, fellow novelist Tahereh Mafi, and their family, where he keeps writing, traveling and hunting for the next peculiar photograph that might spark a story.