Sally Green Books in Order

Sally Green was born in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, and grew up in the north-west of England. Long before she published fantasy novels, she leaned toward science at school, studied geology at Imperial College London, and worked in several very different jobs. Her path into fiction was anything but direct.

Writing arrived late.

Green has said she never thought of herself as the imaginative child in class. After university she worked in business, trained as an accountant, and later stayed home with her son for a time, growing vegetables and keeping chickens. There is something very down-to-earth about that stretch of her life, and you can feel that groundedness in her books, even when witches or demons are involved.

The shift came in 2010, when she had an idea for a story about a girl who did not know she was a witch. She wrote quickly, finished a manuscript, and then realized she needed to learn much more about how novels worked. Open University courses helped, and so did rejection. One agent liked the writing but felt the story needed more edge, so Green went back, reworked the material, and changed the point of view. Once she started telling the story through Nathan, the central voice of Half Bad, the book clicked.

That rewrite changed everything.

Half Bad was published in 2014 and made Green's name fast. The novel follows Nathan, a teenager caught between two enemy witch bloodlines, and it blends chase thriller momentum with questions about prejudice, family, and who gets to define good and evil. Readers who connect with Green often respond to the urgency of her storytelling and the way she lets fear, anger, first love, and loneliness sit on the page without making them neat. The book sold internationally before publication, later won the teen category of the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, and was adapted for television as The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself.

She carried Nathan's story forward in Half Wild and Half Lost, then added the companion ebooks Half Lies and Half Truths. Together, those books widen the world from modern England into a broader European conflict, but they stay closely focused on identity, loyalty, and survival. Green clearly likes characters who are pulled in two directions at once. Her fiction is full of outsiders, uneasy families, shifting alliances, and young people trying to make decent choices inside systems that were never built for them.

After the Half Bad books, she turned to a different kind of fantasy with The Smoke Thieves, followed by The Demon World and The Burning Kingdoms. This trilogy moves into rival kingdoms, demon hunters, court politics, and a dangerous substance that can reshape war itself. Even on a bigger canvas, Green's interests stay much the same: power, prejudice, attraction, betrayal, and the way ordinary human feeling survives inside very dark situations.

Green lives in Cheshire, in the north-west of England, and she has written about keeping fit and spending time running. That small detail feels fitting, because movement matters in her fiction too. Her stories are fast and tense, but they never lose sight of the people inside the chase.