Rebecca Yarros

Rebecca Yarros, born in 1981, studied European history and English at Troy University and began writing while her husband was deployed in Afghanistan. For most of a decade she wrote romance novels, starting with the Flight & Glory series (Full Measures, 2014) and continuing with standalones from Entangled and Montlake, among them The Last Letter (2019), Great and Precious Things (2020), The Things We Leave Unfinished (2021) and In the Likely Event (2023).

Fourth Wing (2023), published by Red Tower Books, moved her into fantasy. Violet Sorrengail, who has trained all her life for the Scribe Quadrant, is forced by her mother, General Sorrengail, to enter Basgiath War College in the kingdom of Navarre and try to become a dragon rider. The book is a new adult fantasy romance; as of August 2024 it had spent 65 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and Publishers Weekly ranked it third among the bestsellers of 2023. Iron Flame followed in November 2023 and Onyx Storm in January 2025; The New York Times reported that Onyx Storm sold more than 2.7 million copies in its first week. Amazon is developing a television adaptation.

Start with Fourth Wing if you came for the dragons. The Empyrean books are numbered and should be read in order, Fourth Wing, then Iron Flame, then Onyx Storm, with no skipping. Fourth Wing also introduces Xaden Riorson, a powerful rider Violet has every reason to fear, and the relationships it sets up carry into the later books. The series is classed as new adult fantasy romance, not young adult, and is written for adult readers.

Readers who prefer her non-fantasy romance can skip the fantasy entirely and start with a standalone such as The Things We Leave Unfinished (2021) or In the Likely Event (2023). Neither requires knowledge of her other books, and both are closer to the work she published for most of her career.