Lydia Kang books

A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything

Anthologies

Control Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Standalone Novels

Star Wars: The High Republic Reading Order

Lydia Kang is a physician and author who writes across multiple genres, including historical fiction, YA science fiction, and narrative non-fiction about medical history. She practices internal medicine, and her medical expertise shows up throughout her work, whether she is writing about 1918 New York poisonings, body-selling in 1850s Manhattan, or the real history of medical quackery.

Her fiction career began with the Control duology (2013-2015), a YA sci-fi series set in a future where genetic modification has gone wrong. She then moved into historical fiction with novels like A Beautiful Poison (2017), set during the 1918 influenza pandemic, The Impossible Girl (2018), about a girl who sells cadavers in 19th-century New York, and Opium and Absinthe (2020), a Gilded Age mystery with a Dracula connection. Her standalone novels regularly combine historical settings with medical or scientific themes.

On the non-fiction side, Kang co-authored Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything (2017), a darkly funny look at history’s most dangerous medical practices, from mercury treatments to lobotomies. She followed it with Patient Zero (2021) and Pseudoscience (2025). Kang also contributed to the Star Wars: The High Republic franchise, a large multi-author publishing initiative. The High Republic series listed here includes all entries in the franchise, with contributions from many different authors alongside Kang.