Tanaz Bhathena Books in Order

Tanaz Bhathena grew up between countries, and that sense of crossing borders runs through much of her work. She was born in Mumbai, then moved with her family to Riyadh when she was very young. Later she lived in Jeddah, and at sixteen she immigrated to Canada, a move that would shape both her life and her fiction.

That in-between feeling matters.

Bhathena has said she fell in love with writing at eight and knew by thirteen that she wanted to write books. She was also a big reader, and over time she noticed something missing from many teen novels: girls like the ones she knew, especially South Asian and Zoroastrian teens, were rarely at the center. That absence pushed her toward writing the kinds of stories she had wanted to find on the shelf.

The path was not neat or quick. Wanting to make her family proud, she studied commerce at university and planned for a practical career in accounting. By her fourth year, though, it was clear her heart was somewhere else. She has spoken about failing job interviews with major accounting firms and finally admitting what she had known for years, that she wanted to be a writer. Around that same period, she wrote the early version of what would become A Girl Like That. It took about a decade of work and persistence before that book found a publisher.

It was worth the wait.

Her debut, A Girl Like That, is set in Jeddah and opens with two teens found dead in a crashed car. From there, the book pieces together the life of Zarin Wadia, a girl judged by nearly everyone around her, and asks harder questions about gender, class, gossip, abuse, and who gets to control a story. Readers responded to its mix of emotional honesty and sharp social observation, and the novel went on to appear on several best-of-the-year lists.

Bhathena followed it with The Beauty of the Moment, another contemporary YA novel, this time about a girl who moves from Saudi Arabia to Canada and falls for a boy carrying his own grief and confusion. It is a love story, but it is also a book about immigrant family pressure, art, ambition, and the messy work of becoming yourself. That interest in young people caught between duty and desire shows up again and again in her fiction.

Then she turned toward fantasy. In Hunted by the Sky and Rising Like a Storm, she builds the kingdom of Ambar, a world inspired by medieval India, and follows Gul and Cavas through rebellion, prophecy, magic, and class conflict. The books keep the emotional stakes close even when the plot gets big. Hunted by the Sky won the White Pine Award and the Bapsi Sidhwa Literary Prize. Later, Of Light and Shadow returned to a South Asia-inspired setting with a standalone fantasy about a bandit leader, a prince, and a kingdom cracked by corruption.

Bhathena lives in Southern Ontario, and has also published short fiction alongside her novels. Whether she is writing contemporary realism or sweeping fantasy, her stories tend to come back to the same things: identity, belonging, family pressure, and young people trying to claim a life that actually feels like their own.