Sarwat Chadda Books in Order

Sarwat Chadda was born and raised in London, and that city still feels like home in both his life and his fiction. He has described himself as a first-generation Muslim immigrant of South Asian descent, and that blend of cultures shows up again and again in his books, where old myths collide with modern streets.

That mix of East and West runs through almost everything he writes.

As a kid, Chadda was drawn to myths, fantasy adventures, and history. He has said that discovering Dungeons and Dragons in about 1980 changed his life. He started writing role-playing scenarios, and the habit stuck. Long before he was publishing novels, he was already figuring out how quests, monsters, and high stakes fit together.

Writing was not his first career. He studied engineering and spent about twenty years working in construction, building systems rather than stories. In his midthirties, after years in that world, he and his wife started talking seriously about what he actually wanted to do next. The answer was simple: tell stories. He began writing novels, entered a competition in 2007, and an early draft of Devil's Kiss won the SCBWI Undiscovered Voices competition in 2008. That led to an agent, then a book deal, and his debut novel arrived in 2009.

It was a career change with teeth.

Readers first met many of his trademark ingredients in Devil's Kiss and Dark Goddess. Those books follow Billi SanGreal, a teenage girl growing up inside a modern Knights Templar order, and they show what Chadda does well: quick-moving plots, monsters with real bite, and heroes who are brave but never comfortable. He likes putting young characters in impossible situations and then making them work their way through grief, duty, faith, and fear.

He took a different path with Ash Mistry and the Savage Fortress, which kicked off a trilogy built around Hindu mythology. Instead of treating those legends like background decoration, he pushed them straight into the center of a modern adventure story. Later, City of the Plague God did something similar with Mesopotamian myth, bringing Sik Aziz, his family, and a very stressed Manhattan into the orbit of gods, demons, and Gilgamesh. More recently, Storm Singer showed that he can build a fresh fantasy world from scratch and still keep the same energy.

Travel has fed a lot of that imagination. Chadda has written about visiting places like India and Russia while researching books, and he has said that backpacking and seeing different parts of the world gave him plenty of future story material. Across his work, certain themes keep returning: ordinary kids facing giant old powers, family ties that complicate everything, and the feeling that myths are not dead at all, just waiting for the right doorway back in.

He has also written beyond his own series, including books connected to The 39 Clues, Spirit Animals, and Minecraft, along with comic books, plays, and television work such as The Legend of Hanuman. His books have appeared in more than a dozen languages.

These days he still lives in London with his wife, two grown daughters, and a cat, and he still makes time for tabletop gaming. He has said he runs a Dungeons and Dragons group on Wednesday evenings, which feels exactly right for a writer who has spent so much of his career turning myth, danger, and adventure into page-turning fun.