Sarah Hawley Books

Sarah Hawley took an unusual road to romance writing: she holds an MA in archaeology and has excavated at an Inca site in Chile, a Bronze Age palace in Turkey, and a medieval abbey in England. Someone who has spent that much time carefully brushing dirt off the past turns out to be very good at building fictional worlds with convincing layers. She debuted with Berkley in 2023 and almost immediately established two distinct lanes, which is rare for an author this early in a career. She has also spoken about the archaeology-to-romance pipeline with good humor, noting that both jobs are mostly about patience, careful excavation, and knowing that the best discoveries are buried deepest.

Lane one is the Glimmer Falls trilogy, paranormal romantic comedy set in a small town where magic is mundane. A Witch's Guide to Fake Dating a Demon introduced Mariel, a plant witch who botches a summoning and accidentally binds herself to a fastidious soul-bargaining demon; A Demon's Guide to Wooing a Witch followed the same year, and A Werewolf's Guide to Seducing a Vampire closed the set in 2024. The books are funny in an actually-funny way, warm about anxiety and family pressure, and stuffed with chaotic townsfolk who steal scenes. Fans of witch heroines and grumpy demon love interests are the core audience, and the fake dating setup in book one remains the series' best trick. Beneath the jokes there is real emotional intelligence about feeling like the family disappointment, which is why the series inspires more loyalty than the average romcom.

Lane two is darker and newer. Servant of Earth (2024) launched the Shards of Magic series, trading small-town comedy for an underground fae court where a human woman, Kenna, is forced into servitude and swept into six deadly trials tied to the branches of magic: Fire, Earth, Light, Void, Illusion, and Blood. Princess of Blood continued the series in 2025. The tone shift is total: survival stakes, courtly cruelty, and a romance that grows in the shadows of a genuinely dangerous world. That an author can do both slapstick demon dating and grim fae trials this convincingly says a lot about her range. Kenna herself is a large part of the draw: pragmatic, wary, and slow to trust in a way that makes every earned intimacy land twice as hard as it would with a softer heroine.

Heat, honestly assessed against our book spice ratings: high in both lanes, a 3 to 4. Glimmer Falls is open-door romcom with explicit scenes played warm and often funny; Shards of Magic keeps the explicitness with a darker charge. Readers who want their spice with jokes go one way, readers who want it with knives go the other, and Hawley is happy to serve both. It is also worth noting she writes some of the better grovel arcs in the business; when her characters mess up, the repair work is taken seriously.

For romantasy readers, she matters as one of the clearest examples of the genre's current split personality: the same audience wants cozy paranormal comfort and brutal fae courts, sometimes in the same week, and very few authors deliver both sides at this quality. Her books also treat consent and emotional honesty as load-bearing, which the spicier end of the genre does not always manage.

Where to start: Servant of Earth if you came here for dark fae romantasy, which is likely if you are on this site. A Witch's Guide to Fake Dating a Demon if you want to laugh first and swoon second. Either way, the other lane will be waiting when your mood flips. Just be sure to check which lane a given title belongs to before gifting one to your sweetest aunt; the covers are cheerier than some of the contents.