Naomi Novik Books

Naomi Novik has had at least three separate careers that would each satisfy most fantasy writers. She broke out in 2006 with His Majesty's Dragon, the first of nine Temeraire novels reimagining the Napoleonic Wars with an aerial corps of dragons, a series that ran through 2016 and earned her a devoted following among readers who like their fantasy with naval discipline and impeccable manners. Then she pivoted to standalone fairy-tale fantasy with Uprooted (2015), which won the Nebula Award, and Spinning Silver (2018), which many readers rank even higher. Then she pivoted again to the Scholomance trilogy, a dark magic-school series that became a BookTok fixture. Almost nobody reinvents themselves this successfully once, let alone twice.

Before any of that, she helped build modern fandom itself. Novik co-founded the Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit behind Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction platform used by millions. That background shows in her writing: she understands exactly which character dynamics readers obsess over, and she builds her books around them without ever feeling cynical about it.

The Scholomance trilogy is her most romantasy-adjacent work. A Deadly Education (2020) introduces El Higgins, a sarcastic half-Welsh, half-Indian sorceress with a prophesied talent for mass destruction, enrolled in a school with no teachers where the monsters eat students who let their guard down. Orion Lake, the school's golden-boy monster hunter, keeps saving her life, and she resents every second of it. The enemies-to-reluctant-allies-to-something-more arc across The Last Graduate (2021) and The Golden Enclaves (2022) is genuinely earned, and the trilogy sticks its ending, which is rarer than it should be. El's narration, all footnotes-in-spirit and furious digressions, is divisive: readers either love her voice immediately or bounce off the first chapter. Give it thirty pages before you decide.

Uprooted and Spinning Silver are the books to hand anyone who loved the folkloric side of romantasy. Uprooted gives you Agnieszka, a village girl taken as tribute by a cold wizard called the Dragon, and a corrupted Wood that is one of the best villains in modern fantasy. Spinning Silver reworks Rumpelstiltskin through Miryem, a Jewish moneylender's daughter whose boast about turning silver into gold attracts the wrong kind of winter king. Both books feature romance, but it stays at a low simmer and shares space with female friendship, family debt, and some truly unsettling forests. Her 2024 collection Buried Deep and Other Stories gathers her short fiction, and The Summer War (2025) follows Celia, who curses her beloved older brother to a life without love and then has to live with the words becoming real magic while her homeland fights a long war against the immortal summerlings.

On our 0-5 spice scale, Novik is a 1. There is desire, there is tension, there is the occasional scene that fades to black or briefly does not, but nobody picks up these books for heat. You pick them up because the yearning is calibrated to the milligram.

For romantasy readers, Novik is the bridge between the genre's current wave and its fairy-tale roots. Uprooted arguably prefigured half the tropes the genre now runs on: the intimidating magical mentor, the tribute setup, the girl whose messy power outstrips the rules. She writes love stories where the romance never rescues the heroine from doing the hard work herself, and her prose is a class up from most of the field.

Start with Uprooted if you want a standalone with fairy-tale bones, Spinning Silver if you want the same flavor with more ambition, or A Deadly Education if you want a series with a central romance and a body count. The Temeraire series is the deep cut: nine books of dragons, naval battles, and found family with essentially no romance, best saved for when you want something completely different. Publication order works fine everywhere.