Three Days Books in Order

The books grouped as the Three Days series are short, sharp young adult novels that drop readers into a damaged future and ask what a handful of teenagers can do in the space of just a few days. Set after an unspecified technological catastrophe has scarred the earth with huge burns and toppled old governments, they sketch a world where small surviving communities cling on in very different ways.

Greenwood imagines Travellers who trade between settlements, medievalist enclaves that have reinvented feudalism, and fanatical "Breakers" who blame machines for the disaster and smash any technology they can find. Her young protagonists come from these clashing cultures and each book follows one critical burst of time in which they are forced to question what they have been taught.

In The Broken Wheel a girl raised among the Breakers discovers the limits of blind hatred for technology and has to decide whether loyalty to her people outweighs the chance to stop another catastrophe. Whaleroad sends a telepathic boy on a dangerous coastal mission where ancient beasts, living ships and powerful psychic forces intersect. Cave Rats pulls a boy out of the sewers and into a revolutionary movement led by a prophet who believes a new way of living is possible. Feral follows Sasha as he uncovers the truth behind an authoritarian "Management" that has taken over a university town and uses fear and surveillance to rule.

Although each novel can be read on its own, together they sketch a mosaic of the same world at a moment when history could tilt either toward renewed tyranny or something more hopeful. The stories move quickly, mix action with ethical questions, and keep the focus tightly on teenagers who are working out who to trust and what kind of future they can stand to live in.

Readers who enjoy the Three Days books can carry straight on into the related Stormbringer trilogy, which picks up some of the same history and ideas with a new cast. Taken as a whole, this corner of Greenwood's work shows how comfortably she could shift from period whodunits to inventive, politically aware science fiction for younger readers.