Rook & Rose Reading Order
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Mask of Mirrors | 2021 | Buy |
| The Liar’s Knot | 2021 | Buy |
| Labyrinth’s Heart | 2023 | Buy |
The Sea Beyond
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Eye of Leviathan | 2026 | Buy |
M.A. Carrick is the shared pen name of Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms, two American fantasy writers who met in 2000 while on an archaeological dig in Wales and Ireland. The name comes from Carrickmacross, the Irish town where part of that dig took place. Marie Brennan holds degrees from Harvard University and Indiana University in folklore and anthropology; Alyc Helms similarly departed a doctoral programme in anthropology and folklore in favour of fiction. Both writers describe their academic backgrounds as a rich source of material for world-building — the sense of different cultures overlapping and creating friction that runs through their fiction is drawn from genuine scholarly interest.
Their individual careers established them as careful, idea-driven fantasy writers: Brennan’s Memoirs of Lady Trent series is a Victorian-influenced fantasy built around a female naturalist, while Helms’s Adventures of Mr. Mystic is rooted in pulp-era superhero mythology. Their collaboration under the M.A. Carrick name produced the Rook and Rose trilogy — three novels set in Nadežra, a canal city modelled on Venice, where power, magic, and identity are all unstable. The trilogy follows Ren, a thief and con artist who infiltrates the city’s nobility under a false name while operating simultaneously as a vigilante and a reader of pattern-cards. The Mask of Mirrors was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten SF/F and Horror Debuts.
Their second series, The Sea Beyond, moves to a Spanish Golden Age setting where maps literally reshape reality. The first book, The Eye of Leviathan (2026), opens with a faerie changeling and the human girl whose place he stole, both caught in the violence of a world-spanning empire. Helms describes the duo’s work as an interest in liminality, identity, and what genre conventions actually do when you look at them closely — qualities that run through both their solo and joint careers.