Naomi Novik books have somehow never had a page on this site until now, which is the kind of oversight you only notice while fixing it, because her career touches every corner of the modern genre. Nine Napoleonic dragon novels, complete. Two standalone fairy-tale masterpieces that collect awards like burrs. A magic-school trilogy that answered the genre’s biggest franchise with a death trap and a scowl. And, off the page, a founding role in the Organization for Transformative Works and the Archive of Our Own, fandom’s great library, which took home a Hugo of its own, making her one of the few authors whose community credentials rival Mark Lawrence’s contest. Her own bio states the formula: born in New York, first-generation American, “raised on Polish fairy tales, Baba Yaga, and Tolkien,” and every shelf she’s built runs on some ratio of those three.
Everything below is finished. No waiting rooms, no vigils, just doors, and the only real question is the famous fork between her two standalones, which this page will referee. Her books sit naturally beside the best fantasy books canon this site maps, and the Slavic taproot of her most-loved novel runs the same soil as Andrzej Sapkowski’s, which is not a coincidence either.
Fiction by René Rehn
The short version
Pick your door by appetite. Uprooted for the lush, romantic, forest-dark fairy tale. Spinning Silver for the colder, cleverer one, winter and debts and three women outplaying kings. A Deadly Education for the school that wants its students dead. His Majesty’s Dragon for Napoleon with an air force. Every series is complete, the standalones are truly standalone, and the newest thing on the shelf is a 2025 novella for after you love her.
Temeraire
Nine books, 2006 to 2016. Complete. Master and Commander, with dragons.
The first career: Captain Will Laurence of His Majesty’s Navy takes a French prize whose cargo turns out to be a dragon egg, and when the hatchling Temeraire chooses him, his naval career ends on the spot, traded for the Aerial Corps, the raffish, scandalous, secretly egalitarian third service of a Napoleonic War fought in three dimensions. The pitch writes itself, Patrick O’Brian’s seamanship swapped for airmanship, and the heart of it is the pairing: Laurence, honor-bound to the point of self-destruction, and Temeraire, a brilliant, bookish dragon who reads philosophy and asks why dragons don’t get paid. It won Novik the Locus for best first novel and ran nine volumes around the entire globe, China to Africa to Australia, before landing the ending in League of Dragons. The honest consensus: the opening trilogy is the tightest, the world tour wanders in the middle, and the whole remains the best long-form dragon partnership the genre has, finished and waiting.
Uprooted
2015. The Nebula winner, and the lush half of the fork.
Agnieszka’s valley lives in the shadow of the Wood, a corrupting forest that takes people and sends back wrongness, and under the protection of the Dragon, a cold immortal wizard who takes one village girl every ten years as payment. The book knows which girl the reader expects him to choose, and so does Agnieszka, which is the first of its tricks. What follows is the great modern fairy-tale novel: hedge-magic against tower-magic, a heroine whose power is crooked and organic, court politics that go abruptly to the knife, and a forest whose menace has actual roots I won’t expose. It won the Nebula, the Locus, and the British Fantasy Award, and its Polish folk soil, Baba Yaga humming under every chapter, is the family inheritance made book. The honest note: the central relationship’s prickly dynamic is beloved by most and a dealbreaker for a visible few, and knowing that going in settles most of the arguments.
Spinning Silver
2018. The cold half, and for many readers the masterpiece.
The companion, not the sequel: a Rumpelstiltskin refraction where the girl who can turn silver to gold is Miryem, a Jewish moneylender’s daughter who takes over the family ledgers because someone has to, and whose boast reaches the wrong ears, the Staryk, winter fae whose road glitters through the trees and whose king deals in impossible bargains. Three women narrate, ledger-keeper, peasant, and unloved noble bride, and the book braids their debts into the smartest plot Novik has built, faith and interest rates treated as seriously as frost magic. The New York Times Book Review reached for Tolkien’s vastness and Le Guin’s empathy in one sentence about it, and the awards followed, Locus, Alex, Mythopoeic. The fork verdict this page owes you: Uprooted overwhelms, Spinning Silver satisfies, the lush door versus the precise one, and the readers who take both a season apart tend to stop arguing about which is better and start rereading.
The Scholomance
A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, The Golden Enclaves. 2020 to 2022. Complete.
The third career answers a question nobody dared ask out loud: what if the magic school was honestly trying to kill you? The Scholomance has no teachers, no janitors, and no mercy, just classrooms, a cafeteria worth fighting over, maleficaria in the vents, and a graduation hall that eats a healthy share of every class on the way out. El Higgins, our narrator, is a half-Welsh, half-Indian scholarship-class nobody with an affinity for mass destruction she refuses to use and a voice, sardonic, furious, secretly principled, that carries all three books. The premise machinery is the draw, El is why people finish, along with Orion Lake, the insufferable hero who keeps saving everyone. The trilogy is complete, decorated along the way with the Lodestar at the Hugos and a Dragon Award for the finale, and it comes with two honest notes: the second book ends on the most infamous cliffhanger of its publishing season, blessedly moot now that the shelf is full, and an early printing of book one contained a passage Novik apologized for as evoking a racist stereotype and revised in later reprints. The series’ reputation survived both, on merit.
The Summer War, Buried Deep, and what’s next
The current shelf-edge: The Summer War (September 2025) is a novella about Celia, a young witch who curses her beloved brother to a life without love and spends her own growing up trying to unmake it, against a centuries-old war with the immortal summerlings, and its early reception ran warm, the word heartfelt doing heavy rotation. Buried Deep and Other Stories (2024), a Locus-finalist collection, tours every world she’s built and, by its own flap’s promise, previews the land where her next novel will be set, which is all anyone officially knows about it. The engine, in other words, is mid-stroke.
A note on where to actually start
It comes down to the fork, taken honestly: Uprooted if you want to be swept, Spinning Silver if you want to be impressed, and the loser of the coin flip next season. The school and the dragons wait behind them, both complete. And for the biography-minded, the whole career decodes cleanly: a computer scientist who left a game studio because the writing was the fun part, a fan who co-built fandom’s own library before the establishment gave it a Hugo, and a first-generation New Yorker who kept faith with the Polish fairy tales she was raised on. The Naomi Novik books are what Baba Yaga’s forest looks like with a version-control system, and there’s no wrong clearing to enter by.
