Tomi Adeyemi Books in Order

Tomi Adeyemi is a Nigerian American writer who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, in a family shaped by Nigerian roots and American life. She has talked about feeling that split early on, one identity at home, another outside it, and that tension later became part of the emotional engine in her fiction.

She started writing young and kept at it through childhood, but the road to publishing wasn't especially neat. At Harvard, where she earned an honors degree in English literature, she once imagined a future in medicine, tried internships in finance and consulting, and spent time figuring out what kind of work actually felt like hers. Books were always in the mix, even when the plan wasn't fully clear yet.

The big turning point came after college, when a Harvard travel grant took her to Brazil to study West African culture and mythology. On a rainy day in Rio de Janeiro, she ducked into a gift shop, saw images of African deities, called her parents back in suburban Chicago, and felt the first spark of the world that would become Orïsha. That moment gave her setting before it gave her plot, which is a very writerly way for a career to change.

Before that spark turned into a career, there was a hard stop.

An earlier novel was rejected by 63 literary agents. Adeyemi has said that failure hurt, but it also forced her to get serious about process, structure, and what she most wanted to say. Out of that stretch came Children of Blood and Bone, the book that introduced many readers to Zélie Adebola and changed Adeyemi's life very quickly.

Children of Blood and Bone became a number one New York Times bestseller and put her work in front of a huge audience. Readers responded to the speed and scale of the story, but also to how it ties magic, grief, state violence, and resistance together without losing sight of character. Its West African inspired setting, shaped in part by Yoruba spiritual traditions, helped the novel stand apart, and Adeyemi's work later brought her Hugo and Nebula honors.

She followed it with Children of Virtue and Vengeance and Children of Anguish and Anarchy, which push the story past the original quest and into harder questions about power, loyalty, and what happens after a revolution starts. Across the trilogy, she returns to people caught between love and duty, siblings under strain, rulers who abuse fear, and young heroes who have to act before they feel ready. There is a lot of movement in these books, but there is also a real interest in grief, recovery, and how history lives inside the body.

She didn't stay in one lane.

Adeyemi has also published The Garden, a short, dreamlike story about loss and searching, and Awaken the Magic, a companion journal built around the world of Orïsha. Her newer slate includes The Siren, a dark campus thriller that shows she is interested in moving beyond one kind of fantasy. Even across different formats, her stories tend to circle the same live questions: who gets erased, who gets protected, and what it costs to keep fighting when the people in charge want your fear more than your future.

She is now based in New York, where her work spans novels, screenwriting, and speaking. She has also described a planning-heavy process with research, spreadsheets, and walls of notes, which fits the size of the worlds she builds. And in one of those small personal details readers tend to remember, she still makes time for the boxing gym.