Shadow and Bone Reading Order
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Shadow and Bone | 2012 | Buy |
| Siege and Storm | 2013 | Buy |
| Ruin and Rising | 2014 | Buy |
Six of Crows Reading Order
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Six of Crows | 2015 | Buy |
| Crooked Kingdom | 2016 | Buy |
Leigh Bardugo grew up in Los Angeles and studied at Yale. She worked in journalism and makeup effects before publishing Shadow and Bone in 2012. The novel introduced the Grishaverse, a fantasy world built on Russian and Slavic influences with a magic system grounded in the manipulation of matter at a small scale.
The Shadow and Bone trilogy follows Alina Starkov, a mapmaker who discovers she can summon light, through a war to destroy the Shadow Fold, a barrier of darkness splitting the nation of Ravka. Bardugo completed the trilogy in 2014 with Ruin and Rising.
Six of Crows (2015) and Crooked Kingdom (2016) shifted to a different corner of the same world. Set in the merchant city of Ketterdam, these books follow a crew of criminals pulling off an impossible heist. The duology is widely considered Bardugo’s strongest work, with tighter plotting and a more complex ensemble cast than the original trilogy.
The King of Scars duology returns to Ravka, following the new king as he deals with both political threats and a dark power growing inside him. Bardugo also launched the Alex Stern series with Ninth House (2019), a contemporary fantasy about secret societies at Yale. Netflix adapted the Grishaverse as a television series that ran for two seasons.