Katherine Arden Books in Order

If you want adult historical fantasy: The Bear and the Nightingale → The Girl in the Tower → The Winter of the Witch.
If you prefer middle-grade horror: Small Spaces → Dead Voices → Dark Waters → Empty Smiles.
If you want a standalone with ghosts and war: The Warm Hands of Ghosts.
If you want newer historical fantasy: The Unicorn Hunters.

Katherine Arden was born in Austin, Texas, and describes herself as a kid from Texas who kept finding her way to colder places. After high school, she spent a gap year in Moscow. Later, at Middlebury College in Vermont, she studied French and Russian and graduated in 2011.

At that point, she thought her future might be in languages, diplomacy, interpretation, or linguistics. Writing was something she loved privately, not a job plan. She had written a dragon book in high school and put it away, which is probably where many first novels are safest.

Then she stepped off the train.

After college, Arden moved to Hawaii and worked on farms, including coffee and macadamia nut farms, along with other odd jobs. The work gave her plenty of space to be bored, and boredom did what a neat career plan had not. She began writing a story set in a wintry Russia very far from the heat and mud around her.

She kept going through moves. She taught English in the French Alps, returned to Maui, took practical jobs, and kept trying to finish the book. In 2014 an agent took it on, and the book deal that followed let her leave a real estate office for a writing life.

That story became The Bear and the Nightingale, the first book in the Winternight Trilogy. Its heroine, Vasilisa Petrovna, can see the spirits of Russian folklore, and the novel grew out of Arden's time in Moscow, her reading in Russian fairy tales, and a child named Vasilisa she knew in Hawaii. The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch followed, carrying Vasya from a remote village toward Moscow and the larger dangers of history, faith, family, and magic.

Vasya opened the door.

Arden then turned to younger readers with the Small Spaces quartet: Small Spaces, Dead Voices, Dark Waters, and Empty Smiles. Those books are set in present-day Vermont and follow Ollie Adler and her friends Brian and Coco as they face the Smiling Man through a year of seasonal scares. They are creepy, but they are also about grief, loyalty, and kids learning when to trust one another.

Her standalone adult novel The Warm Hands of Ghosts moves to the First World War, where a combat nurse searches for her brother amid rumors of haunted trenches and a strange power that lets soldiers forget. With The Unicorn Hunters, Arden returns to historical fantasy, this time following Anne of Brittany into a forest of politics, danger, and old magic.

Across her books, Arden tends to write about people caught between worlds: old belief and new faith, childhood and adulthood, war and home, fear and courage. She likes forests, winter, folklore, stubborn girls, loyal friends, and bargains that cost more than they first seem to. These days she lives in Vermont with her husband and dog, grows flowers, reads, hikes, skis, and keeps writing.