Andrea Stewart Books

Andrea Stewart, the daughter of immigrants, raised across a string of American states, launched one of the strongest epic fantasy careers of the 2020s with The Bone Shard Daughter (2020). The premise remains one of the decade's best hooks: in the Phoenix Empire, the emperor's constructs, chimera servants animated by engraved shards of bone, keep order, and every shard is carved from a living citizen's skull, slowly draining the donor's life. Lin, the emperor's daughter, has lost her memories and must secretly teach herself the forbidden bone shard magic to claim her inheritance. The trilogy, continued in The Bone Shard Emperor (2021) and concluded in The Bone Shard War (2023), is known as the Drowning Empire: migrating islands, sunken histories, an empire rotting from its own animating magic.

Stewart's signature is magic with a bill attached. Bone shard magic is horrifying precisely because it is bureaucratic: shards collected at festivals, catalogued, spent. Her follow-up series doubled down on that instinct. The Hollow Covenant trilogy, beginning with The Gods Below (2024) and completed by The War Beyond (2025) and The Legend Eternal (2026), imagines a world remade by a god's bargain, where restored lands come at the price of submission to the gods and a sister on each side of the divide. Across both series she keeps asking the same sharp question: what do systems built on sacrifice owe the sacrificed? A new thriller is also on the way, showing range beyond secondary-world fantasy.

Let us be candid about the romance quotient, since this is a romantasy site. Stewart is epic fantasy first; on our spice scale she is a 0 to 1. But her relationships punch far above their page count. The Drowning Empire features Phalue and Ranami, a sapphic couple whose arc, a governor's daughter and the revolutionary who loves her, gives the series its warmest thread, alongside Lin's guarded, prickly bond with the smuggler Jovis (and Mephi, his impossible sea-otter-ish companion, the true heartthrob of the trilogy). These are found family books at their core: crews, constructs, and creatures assembling into something worth drowning for.

Who should read her: romantasy readers ready to cross into epic fantasy without losing emotional stakes, fans of morally gray rulers and revolutionaries, and anyone who loved the animal-companion bond in Fourth Wing and wants it with more teeth and fewer classroom scenes. Mephi alone converts skeptics. Who should skip her: readers who need a central romance driving every chapter, or high heat anywhere. The love stories here are real but they share the stage with empire-scale plot, multiple points of view, and magic-system problem-solving.

Her structural ambition is worth flagging too. The Drowning Empire runs five point-of-view characters, including a discarded construct slowly waking to selfhood in one of the trilogy's best arcs, and Stewart braids them so the reader assembles the empire's true history before any single character can. The Hollow Covenant tightens to a dual-sister structure that reads faster and cuts deeper. She is also refreshingly disciplined about endings: both trilogies were planned as trilogies, arrived on schedule a year apart, and finished. In a genre era defined by sprawling unfinished sagas, an author who reliably lands the plane every third book has earned more trust than most, and her thriller detour suggests the discipline travels.

Start with The Bone Shard Daughter, then The Bone Shard Emperor and The Bone Shard War in order; the trilogy is complete and the ending pays off its promises. Move to The Gods Below when you want something darker and more theological. Both series reward binge reading, since Stewart plants details early and detonates them books later. Pack for sea travel, and be kind to anything that says "very bad" in a small voice.