BB Alston Books in Order

B.B. Alston spent a long time treating writing as the thing he loved on the side, not the thing he expected to build a life around. He lives in South Carolina, and his public bio still gives a pretty good picture of him: he likes sweets, country-road drives, and stories that open a door in the ordinary world and reveal something strange behind it.

He started young.

In middle school, he wrote goofy horror stories about his classmates, usually built around field trips gone wrong, haunted places, and the question everyone wanted answered: who would make it to the end? He has said the other kids would gather around to read them, and that was the first time he realized something he made up could hold people's attention. Writing stuck, even when it was not yet a career plan.

Reading mattered just as much. Alston has talked about loving fantasy from an early age, especially books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Where the Wild Things Are. He was drawn to stories where the everyday world suddenly gets bigger, weirder, and more exciting. That sense of wonder runs straight through his own work.

For a long time, though, writing stayed in the background. He kept at it, sent work out, and collected plenty of rejections. In his 30s he decided to take another serious shot after reading Twilight and thinking, in a very practical way, that maybe he had a story worth trying too. Even then, publishing did not open up overnight. He finished a pre-med degree, started applying to medical school, and was accepted to Geisinger Medical School in Pennsylvania. At that point, becoming a doctor looked more likely than becoming a novelist.

Then a tweet changed everything.

While waiting to fill out paperwork for a seasonal job, Alston saw the #DVPit pitch event on Twitter and decided to post a short pitch for Amari and the Night Brothers. The idea behind the book came partly from Men in Black and a question he kept turning over: what if a secret agency handled not just aliens, but every myth and legend people think cannot be real? The other big piece was Amari herself, a Black girl from modest means, someone he felt he knew from the inside. Agents responded. A book deal followed. Soon after that, the series was picked up for a film adaptation. Amari and the Night Brothers went on to become a bestseller and won Barnes and Noble's inaugural Children's and YA Book Award.

That quick summary makes it sound easy. It was not.

What readers tend to like about Alston's books is easy to see. Amari and the Night Brothers has a secret bureau, magical tryouts, a missing-person mystery, and a heroine who has to keep going while everyone around her doubts her. Amari and the Great Game widens the world and raises the stakes, but it keeps the same heartbeat: fast plotting, humor, friendship, and a strong feeling that the outsider in the room might also be the person best equipped to save it. The series later continued with Amari and the Despicable Wonders.

Across his work, Alston keeps returning to a few ideas. He writes about kids who feel out of place, about prejudice dressed up as rules, and about the hard job of learning to trust yourself when other people have already decided who you are. He also likes hidden systems, strange creatures, and magical worlds tucked right beside everyday life. Those books move quickly, but they are doing more than one thing at once.

These days, Alston is still based in South Carolina, still writing fantasy, and still clearly enjoying the ride. He has described himself as an introvert, which makes the size of his success a little funny in the best way. But that mix fits his books too. They are imaginative and loud on the page, built by someone who spent years quietly figuring out how to tell the story he wanted to see when he was younger.