Rebecca Roanhorse Books

Rebecca Roanhorse had one of the fastest ascents in modern speculative fiction. Her 2017 short story Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and she picked up the Astounding Award for best new writer in the same sweep. Her debut novel Trail of Lightning arrived in 2018, introducing Maggie Hoskie, a Dine monster hunter in a post-apocalyptic Southwest where the gods and legends of Navajo tradition walk again, and its sequel Storm of Locusts followed in 2019. In the space of three years she went from unknown to one of the most talked-about writers in the field.

Her defining work is the Between Earth and Sky trilogy, an epic fantasy inspired by the pre-Columbian Americas rather than medieval Europe: Black Sun in 2020, Fevered Star in 2022, and Mirrored Heavens in 2024. The first book alone earned nominations for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Its story converges on the holy city of Tova during a solar eclipse, as a blinded young man raised to become the vessel of the Crow God sails toward destiny with Xiala, a hard-drinking sea captain whose Teek song can calm or kill. Alongside the trilogy she has written Star Wars: Resistance Reborn, Race to the Sun for the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, Marvel comics, and television work including FX's A Murder at the End of the World and the Disney+ series Echo.

What defines Roanhorse's writing is scope with a knife's edge. She builds cities, religions, and political orders with epic-fantasy ambition, then tells the story through intimate, damaged people: a boy raised as a weapon, a priest trying to reform an institution that wants her dead, a captain whose own people exiled her. Prophecy in her books is not comforting; being a chosen one is presented as a form of abuse with excellent branding. Her villains have a case, her heroes have blood on their hands, and the books trust readers to sit with that.

On heat, the trilogy runs low, a 1 to 2 on our spice scale. Xiala brings a bisexual sailor's swagger and there is on-page sensuality, but intimacy is brief and the story's pulse is power, faith, and vengeance rather than romance. The bond between Xiala and Serapio is genuinely moving precisely because it grows between two people the world has treated as weapons, but readers should come for the epic and let the love story be a bonus.

For romantasy readers, Roanhorse is essential genre ancestry and a horizon-widener. The current wave of morally gray love interests and doomed, fate-crossed pairings owes a great deal to books like Black Sun that made ambiguity mainstream. And if your fantasy diet has been exclusively fae courts, her Americas-inspired worldbuilding is the most refreshing thing you can hand yourself this year: familiar emotional beats, entirely new sky.

Roanhorse's screen work deserves its own mention, because it feeds back into the novels. Writing for Marvel's Echo and FX's A Murder at the End of the World sharpened an already cinematic style: her chapters cut like scenes, her action reads in real time, and her dialogue carries exposition without creaking. She lives in New Mexico, and the high desert light of the Southwest is all over both series, from Maggie Hoskie's Dinetah to the sun-bleached terraces of Tova. Few authors move between prose and screen this fluidly.

Start with Black Sun and read the trilogy in order through Mirrored Heavens; the eclipse structure rewards continuity. If you prefer urban fantasy with a bounty-hunter pace, Trail of Lightning is the better entry and Storm of Locusts completes the arc. Race to the Sun works for younger readers. Wherever you start, expect gods who show up in person and stay.