Sarah Lyons Fleming Books in Order

If you want her core story first: Until the End of the World → So Long, Lollipops → And After → All the Stars in the Sky
If you like gritty urban survival with romance: Mordacious → Peripeteia → Instauration
If you prefer a sweeping West Coast saga: World Departed → World Between → World Without → World Undone

Sarah Lyons Fleming was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up as the kind of kid who always had a book in her hand. Long before she wrote about ruined cities and safe zones, she was drawn to stories about survival, harsh winters, and people figuring out how to live together when everything goes wrong.

As a reader she gravitated to books like Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter and Robert Merle's Malevil, which quietly planted the seeds of her fascination with prepping and end of the world scenarios. Those stories, mixed with a steady diet of other post apocalyptic novels, convinced her that the most interesting part of any catastrophe is how ordinary people respond to it.

Fleming studied sociology in college, a choice that fit her curiosity about how groups work and why people behave the way they do. Eventually she traded East Coast city streets for the forests and mountains of Oregon, where she lives with her husband, two kids, two cats, and a rotating cast of small pets. Out there she leans into her self described role as a wannabe prepper, happy to stock shelves, test water filters, and tinker with bug out bags, even if she jokes that she is still nowhere near ready for an actual zombie outbreak.

Writing fiction was not a childhood dream so much as a late surprise. Around 2011, while she was at home with a young son who would only nap if she stayed parked on the couch, she tore through self published prepper and post apocalyptic novels. She loved the genre but kept noticing how often the heroes were the same kind of ex military, hyper prepared men. What she wanted instead was a sarcastic, everyday woman facing the end of the world with friends, family, and a sense of humor.

To scratch that itch she began drafting what became Until the End of the World, typing away during nap time and imagining she might someday share the chapters on prepper and homesteading forums. Instead she chose to self publish the book in 2013, and it quietly found an audience that grew by word of mouth. The audiobook edition, narrated by Julia Whelan, went on to earn an Audie Award nomination, and readers embraced the blend of zombies, road trips, and found family.

Since then Fleming has expanded that universe in new directions. The original Until the End of the World trilogy and its novella follow Brooklyn artist Cassie Forrest from a cabin in rural Pennsylvania to a farm based Safe Zone and, eventually, toward a last chance haven in Alaska. The City series shifts the focus to Sylvie Rossi and Eric Forrest as they try to build community inside a besieged Brooklyn neighborhood, while the Cascadia books tell the story of the virus on the West Coast through the eyes of Rose Winter, Tom Jensen, Clara, Craig, and the people who gather around them.

Across all three series Fleming is less interested in military hardware than in small human details, like learning to can food, argue over chores, or fall in love when there are zombies at the fence. Her stories are full of banter, sarcasm, and pop culture jokes, but they also sit with grief, trauma, and the cost of leadership. Readers often describe her work as zombie fiction with heart, where the horror matters but the relationships matter more.

From her home in Oregon she keeps writing about ordinary people in impossible situations, still stockpiling the occasional can of beans and refining her emergency kits. When she is not working on the next installment in her apocalyptic worlds, she reads, makes artsy projects, hangs out with her family, and happily avoids large crowds, leaving most of her socializing to the page and to the readers who have followed her through every ruined city and overgrown back road.