The Shadow Age Books in Order

The Shadow Age is a contemporary fantasy series set in St. Unoc, a desert city where magic and luck are literally woven into everyday life. Petra Grady has grown up knowing she has no knack for traditional spellcasting, a painful fact in a family and culture that prizes magical talent. What she does have is a rare ability to see and safely handle dross, the toxic, bad-luck-laden residue left behind when others work their spells.

At the start of Three Kinds of Lucky, Petra has made a decent if unglamorous life for herself as a sweeper first-class at the local mages’ university. Her job is to move through laboratories and classrooms scooping up dross before it warps probability, sickens bystanders, or attracts things even worse. The people who benefit from her work tend to look down on her, but they cannot function without what she does.

Everything shifts when Benedict Strom, a brilliant researcher and Petra’s estranged former friend, asks for her help on a project meant to neutralize dross entirely. The experiment goes wrong in a spectacular way, forcing Petra and Benedict to flee the city and seek out a disgraced weaver who once used dross as a power source. Along the way Petra begins to see that her supposed lack of magic may hide a different kind of strength tied to shadows themselves.

Shadows in this world are not just absences of light. They are semi-sentient echoes of magic, feared and tightly controlled after an ancient cataclysm. Petra’s work brings her into direct contact with them, and over the course of the series she bonds with a shadow named Pluck. That partnership, unheard of for centuries, upends long-standing assumptions about who gets to wield power and what counts as acceptable magic.

In the second book, Secondhand Luck, Petra and Pluck have carved out a precarious place at St. Unoc as a shadow–weaver pair. Their existence alone unsettles the mage courts. When a new weaver arrives carrying the influence of an ancient, treacherous shadow called Thoth, the political tension snaps. Thoth engineers disasters that point straight back to Petra, and suddenly she and Pluck are blaming for crimes that echo long-buried history.

The series spends as much time on friendships, academic infighting, and the slow work of changing institutions as it does on overt magical battles. Petra is practical, a little sardonic, and painfully aware of how systems are stacked against people like her. Luck magic, dross, and shadows give the books a fresh twist, but the emotional core is about finding a place where you belong and deciding when to risk that place for something better.

If you are curious about Harrison’s work outside the Hollows, The Shadow Age offers a new world with its own deep rules, familiar humor, and a heroine who wins more by persistence than raw power.