V.E. Schwab Books

Victoria Schwab, writing for adults as V.E. Schwab, is one of the defining fantasy authors of her generation, and she got there by ignoring every piece of advice about staying in one lane. Since debuting in 2011 she has written middle grade ghost stories, YA superhero noir, adult portal fantasy, and a centuries spanning vampire epic, publishing over twenty books that have been translated worldwide. Her breakout came twice: first with the Shades of Magic trilogy starting in 2015, then massively with The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue in 2020, which parked itself on the New York Times bestseller list for months and turned her into a household name for readers who had never touched her backlist.

Shades of Magic remains the fan favorite gateway. Beginning with A Darker Shade of Magic, it imagines four parallel Londons, Red, Grey, White, and Black, connected only by rare blood magicians called Antari. Kell, one of the last Antari, smuggles trinkets between worlds until a piece of forbidden magic follows him home, and Delilah Bard, a cutpurse with dreams of piracy, picks his pocket at exactly the wrong moment. Lila Bard is the series' engine, one of the great knife first heroines in modern fantasy. Schwab returned to this world in 2023 with The Fragile Threads of Power, launching a follow up trilogy.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a different animal, a quiet, melancholy fable about a French woman in 1714 who trades her soul for freedom and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets, until three hundred years later a boy in a bookshop remembers her. It is a book about art, memory, and stubborn survival, and its romance is bittersweet rather than swoony. Then came Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil in June 2025, her most acclaimed book yet: a dark, sensual novel following three lesbian vampires across five centuries, from 1500s Spain to modern Boston. It debuted as an instant bestseller and won the Goodreads Choice Award for fantasy.

Schwab is not a romantasy author in the current sense, and readers should calibrate. On The Fae Shelf spice scale her work mostly sits at 1 to 2. Romance threads through everything she writes, frequently queer, always charged, but she trades explicit heat for longing, and her endings often hurt. Bury Our Bones is her most sensual book by a distance, though still literary in its approach, more hunger than choreography.

She matters to this audience because she is where many romantasy readers go when they want the atmosphere and the yearning with more prose ambition, and because her influence is everywhere: morally gray immortals, found family crews, and doomed queer love stories owe her a debt. Her Netflix adaptation First Kill in 2022 was short lived, but screen interest in her catalog continues.

A word on Vicious, because the fandom will never forgive its omission. Her 2013 adult debut about two college roommates who engineer near death experiences to gain superpowers, then spend a decade trying to destroy each other, remains for many readers her sharpest book. Victor Vale and Eli Ever are both terrible people, the book knows it, and the moral grayness that romantasy readers prize was rarely done better. Its sequel Vengeful expanded the world in 2018. If you like your protagonists closer to villains than heroes, that duology is a hidden door into her catalog that skips the hype cycles entirely.

Where to start depends on your mood. Want adventure and a heroine with knives? A Darker Shade of Magic, then straight through the trilogy before Fragile Threads. Want to ache for three hundred pages? Addie LaRue. Want vampires done as literature? Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, which needs no prior Schwab experience and might be her best book.