SA Chakraborty Books in Order

If you want the core epic fantasy arc: The City of Brass → The Kingdom of Copper → The Empire of Gold
If you want the full Daevabad experience: The City of Brass → The Kingdom of Copper → The Empire of Gold → The River of Silver
If you want a newer, swashbuckling entry point: The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi

S. A. Chakraborty, who also publishes as Shannon Chakraborty, was born and raised in New Jersey. She grew up with a deep interest in history, especially the medieval Middle East, and that curiosity would later shape almost everything she wrote.

History got there first.

She converted to Islam in her teens, a change that deepened her connection to the histories, stories, and communities that would become central to her fiction. In college she studied abroad in Cairo and packed her schedule with history classes, spending time in a city that would later become one of her richest fictional touchstones.

At one point, Chakraborty expected an academic life. She has said she wanted to go to graduate school for medieval Islamic history, but the 2008 financial crisis pushed those plans off course. While working, supporting her family, and raising young children, she started building a fantasy world on the side, first as a hobby and what she later called a kind of historical fan fiction.

That side project became The City of Brass, her 2017 debut and the start of the Daevabad books. The trilogy continued with The Kingdom of Copper and The Empire of Gold, following Nahri, Ali, and Dara through court politics, old grudges, and wars shaped by memory as much as magic. Readers often come to these novels for the djinn, the hidden cities, and the sweeping stakes. They tend to stay for the messier human stuff, divided loyalties, family pressure, faith, class, and characters trying to do decent things inside systems built on older violence.

She likes big worlds, but she keeps the people in them close.

That balance shows up again in The River of Silver, a collection of stories set around the Daevabad trilogy, and in The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, which shifts from palace walls to the open sea. Amina is a retired pirate captain, a mother, and a woman with a complicated legend attached to her, which makes the book a good example of what Chakraborty does well: large-scale adventure with very personal stakes. Across her work, certain interests keep returning. She writes about power and exile, about trade and travel, about medicine, storytelling, belief, and the way old empires leave long shadows behind them. Her settings feel researched, but they rarely read like homework. The books move fast, the banter is sharp, and even the grand magical conflicts usually come back to questions of duty, identity, and who gets to belong.

Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has been nominated for major science fiction and fantasy awards, including the Hugo, Locus, World Fantasy, Crawford, and Astounding. Those facts matter, but they do not fully explain why readers connect with her books. The simpler answer is that she writes immersive adventure stories with strong emotional currents and a real sense of history beneath the magic.

Chakraborty now lives in New Jersey with her family and cats, though she keeps much of her personal life private. That choice fits the work. Her novels are full of legends and grand histories, but they never forget the ordinary people living inside them.