Camilla Andrew Books

Camilla Andrew is one of those indie authors who feels like a secret handshake. She lives in a leafy English town, works a local government day job, and in June 2023 self-published When The Stars Alight, the opening novel of her Essence of the Equinox trilogy. No massive marketing machine, no celebrity blurbs, just steady word of mouth from readers who kept using the same word about her prose: luscious. Her shorter fiction has appeared with Cloaked Press and midnight & indigo, but the trilogy is where her readership lives, and it has been growing one converted reader at a time since the debut landed.

What defines her writing is the sentence-level craft. Andrew writes lush, ornate prose in a gaslamp fantasy world thick with courtly intrigue, and reviewers regularly reach for comparisons like Catherynne Valente and Angela Carter, which is not company most romantasy gets mentioned in. This is gothic fantasy that actually reads gothic: opulent, shadowy, a little overripe on purpose. If you read for voice and atmosphere as much as plot, she is a genuine find, and if you skim description to get to dialogue, she is probably not for you.

The story so far: When The Stars Alight follows Princess Laila Rose, a fallen star in human form and beloved guardian of humanity, who comes face to face with an occasso, a monstrous demon prince entombed in ice and everything her radiant nature stands against. He is articulate, manipulative, and monstrously handsome, and the book wrings every drop of tension from their opposition while court politics tighten around them both. The Sanguine Sorceress, a prequel novella, gives the sorceress Serafina her own origin story, and We Will Devour The Night arrived in 2024 as the second full installment, deepening the political intrigue and the dangerous rivalries pulling Laila in different directions.

On heat, be prepared: this is explicit, open-door romance that readers place around a 3 to 4 on our spice ratings, and the attraction hits fast and hard rather than simmering for 400 pages. Fair warning if you are a strict slow-burn reader, because instalust is baked into the premise from the very first meeting. The light-and-dark pairing means devotion with teeth, possessive tension, and a love interest who is never quite safe to want, which is of course the entire point of a romance like this one.

Honest context: reviews are genuinely split. Readers who click with her lose their minds over the prose and the pairing, while others find the romance moves too fast or want more character development between the set pieces. That divide is worth knowing going in. She is not a crowd-pleaser in the Fourth Wing mold, she is a specific flavor, and the readers who love that flavor tend to become evangelists for her work. For the romantasy audience she matters as proof of how much range the indie side of the genre has right now: while traditional publishing chases dragon riders, writers like Andrew are doing decadent, literary-leaning monster romance with total creative control and no sanding down of the strange edges.

Start with When The Stars Alight to see if the prose seduces you, which you will know within a chapter or two. The Sanguine Sorceress works before or after book one, and We Will Devour The Night follows. The trilogy is still in progress, so you will be waiting on the finale with the rest of us, but the first two books give you plenty to sink into. If forbidden love with an actual monster sounds like your next obsession, she has more than earned a spot on your list, and you get to be the friend who found her first.