James Dashner

James Dashner, born in 1972, moved from Atlanta to Provo, Utah, to study at Brigham Young University, where he earned a master's degree in accounting. His first novel, A Door in the Woods (2003), began the Jimmy Fincher Saga. After finishing that series he started two more: The 13th Reality, whose first book, The Journal of Curious Letters (2008), was a Borders Original Voices pick, and The Maze Runner.

The Maze Runner (2009) opens with a boy named Thomas arriving in the Glade, a clearing enclosed by a maze, among teenagers whose memories have been wiped. The Scorch Trials (2010) and The Death Cure (2011) complete the trilogy, gradually revealing a world devastated by massive solar flares and the organization, WICKED, behind the maze. The three film adaptations (2014, 2015 and 2018) grossed an estimated $949 million. Dashner later added two prequels, The Kill Order (2012) and The Fever Code (2016); a novella, Crank Palace (2020); the Mortality Doctrine series, which opened with The Eye of Minds (2013), about a hacker named Michael inside the VirtNet; and The Maze Cutter, a sequel trilogy set 73 years after The Death Cure.

Read The Maze Runner first, then The Scorch Trials and The Death Cure. The trilogy deliberately releases its backstory out of chronological order: Thomas and the reader learn about WICKED and the solar-flare disaster a piece at a time. The prequels lay much of that history out directly, so they work best after the trilogy. BookList4u's Maze Runner list follows this publication order.

Once the trilogy is done, read The Kill Order, set 13 years before The Maze Runner, then The Fever Code. Readers who want more can move on to The Maze Cutter (2022), The Godhead Complex (2023) and The Infinite Glade (2025).