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Temeraire is Napoleon’s wars fought with dragons in the sky, and it is one of the best ideas fantasy has produced this century. I picked up His Majesty’s Dragon in my early teens with zero expectations beyond “dragons, cool,” and came out the other side genuinely invested in the Napoleonic Wars, which is not something I expected a book about a talking Chinese Celestial dragon to do to me.
Naomi Novik has been quietly building one of the most versatile bibliographies in modern fantasy since that first trilogy landed in 2006. She’s moved from alternate military history to fairy-tale-inspired standalones to a magic school that makes Hogwarts look like a health and safety violation waiting to happen, and by 2026 her catalogue sits close to twenty books deep. Here’s every series, in the order you should actually read them, plus where a first-timer should start.
Who Is Naomi Novik?
Novik trained as a computer scientist before she gave it up to write full time, which tracks, because her magic systems are often built like machines: rules that snap together, consequences that compound, no hand-waving. Her breakout idea was simple enough to explain in one sentence, the Napoleonic Wars, but with aerial dragon corps fighting alongside infantry and navy, and complicated enough to sustain nine books without the concept going stale.
She’s since picked up a Hugo, a Nebula, and a small army of devoted readers who will happily fight you over whether Uprooted or Spinning Silver is the better standalone. Her full back catalogue, including short fiction, is listed on Goodreads.
The Temeraire Series, in Order
This is the one to start with if you came here for dragons and history in equal measure, and it’s genuinely one of the best entries on any best dragon books list precisely because the dragons aren’t decoration. They have politics, culture, and their own chain of command. Read it in publication order, the story is fully serial, no skipping.
1. His Majesty’s Dragon (2006)
Captain Will Laurence captures a French ship and finds a dragon egg in the hold. It hatches early, bonds to him on the spot, and his naval career is over before it properly began, dragon riders live and fight apart from “respectable” society. What follows is basically flight school under the threat of French invasion, and it’s a fantastic hook for the whole series.
2. Throne of Jade (2006)
Temeraire turns out to be a Celestial, a breed reserved for Chinese royalty, and China wants him back. Laurence and Temeraire are shipped east on a diplomatic mission that’s really a tug of war over ownership, dressed up in courtesy and threats.
3. Black Powder War (2006)
Overland from China to Istanbul to collect three dragon eggs Britain desperately needs, and naturally nothing about that trip goes to plan. Ambushes, shifting alliances, and one furious, vengeful dragon named Lien turn a supply run into a war on the road.
4. Empire of Ivory (2007)
A mystery illness is wiping out the Aerial Corps back home, leaving Britain almost defenceless in the sky. The search for a cure takes Laurence and Temeraire to Africa, where they run into a version of dragon-human relations that makes Britain’s whole system look shameful by comparison.
5. Victory of Eagles (2008)
Laurence is convicted of treason and separated from Temeraire just as Napoleon actually invades and occupies British soil. The back half of this book is Laurence scraping together a scrappy, unwanted dragon militia to fight back, which is some of the best material in the series.
6. Tongues of Serpents (2010)
Exile in the penal colony of New South Wales, tasked with escorting dragon eggs into unmapped territory. Slower and more colonial-politics-heavy than earlier entries, but it sets up threads that pay off later.
7. Crucible of Gold (2012)
Restored to active duty and sent to South America to stop France winning new dragon allies, Laurence and Temeraire end up negotiating between the Inca, an exiled Portuguese court, and the powerful Tswana empire, arguably the most ambitious political plot in the series.
8. Blood of Tyrants (2013)
A shipwreck leaves Laurence in Japan with no memory of Temeraire or the years they’ve spent together, while Temeraire pushes on through China and Russia without him. The amnesia plot is a bold swing this late in a series, and it mostly lands.
9. League of Dragons (2016)
The final book, bringing the Napoleonic campaign, and Laurence and Temeraire’s arc, to a close. If you’ve made it eight books deep, you already know whether you’re finishing this one. You are.
Bonus: Golden Age and Other Stories (2017)
Not a novel but a short story collection, and technically optional, but worth knowing about if you finish League of Dragons and aren’t ready to leave. Each story was inspired by a piece of fan art, and the highlight is a Pride and Prejudice mashup that drops Elizabeth Bennet into the Aerial Corps. Best saved until after book nine, since several stories lean on knowing how the main series ends.
If Temeraire scratches an itch for military dragon fiction, it’s worth pairing with something like Fire & Blood for a different flavour of dragon-and-empire storytelling, or Floating Dragon if you want dragons without the historical scaffolding at all.
The Scholomance Trilogy, in Order
Novik’s other major series swaps Regency England for a magic school with no teachers, no safety nets, and a body count that would make Hogwarts’s staff quit on principle. If someone tells you this is “Harry Potter but dark,” they are underselling how genuinely nasty the Scholomance’s rules are.
1. A Deadly Education (2020)
El Higgins is a student with terrifying, borderline villain-tier magic and a habit of not using it, because the last time her kind of power got used properly, it ended civilisations. Survival at the Scholomance means making alliances, and El is spectacularly bad at making friends.
2. The Last Graduate (2021)
Senior year, which is the year the school’s monsters get serious about eating the graduating class before they can leave. El’s reluctant alliance with golden-boy Orion Lake becomes the emotional spine of the book, and the ending is a genuine gut-punch.
3. The Golden Enclaves (2022)
The trilogy closer, dealing with the fallout of graduation and the wider war between the wealthy magical “enclaves” and everyone outside them. It’s the most political of the three, and the most satisfying as a conclusion.
Fans of morally grey protagonists muscling their way through brutal systems will find a lot to like here, it shares DNA with the survival-through-competence energy of Dungeon Crawler Carl, just filtered through a boarding-school lens instead of a game show.
Standalone Fantasy Novels
Novik’s standalones are where she experiments outside a fixed universe, and they’re also the easiest entry point if nine-book commitments make you nervous.
Uprooted (2015)
A Polish-folklore-inspired fantasy about a village that pays tribute to a wizard called the Dragon (not an actual dragon, sorry) by handing over one girl every ten years. Agnieszka is chosen, expects to be discarded once her decade is up, and instead turns out to be the one with the real power. Dense, wintery, and genuinely inventive with its magic system.
Spinning Silver (2018)
Retells Rumpelstiltskin and does it better than the source material has any right to expect from a story that’s basically “guy spins straw into gold, demands a baby.” Miryem is a moneylender’s daughter who can turn silver into gold, metaphorically at first, then very much literally when a fairy king with ice in his veins takes her boast at face value and drags her into his world to prove it. Three narrators, three separate problems, all braided together with the kind of patience Novik’s standalones do best. Fewer readers rank it above Uprooted, but the ones who do tend to rank it a lot higher, and I’m one of them.
The Summer War (2025)
Novik’s most recent standalone, and her shortest, a fairy-tale novella about a girl who curses her own brother to a life without love in a fit of childhood fury, then spends the rest of the book trying to undo it. It leans on the same folkloric instincts as Uprooted and Spinning Silver but in a fraction of the page count, and it’s a good option if you want to try her fairy-tale mode without the full commitment of a novel.
Buried Deep and Other Stories (2023)
A short fiction collection, not a novel, but worth mentioning because it collects Novik’s scattered novellas and stories in one place, including a Temeraire side-story for anyone who finished League of Dragons and still wanted more. Uneven the way collections tend to be, but the Scholomance-adjacent pieces are worth the cover price alone.
The One Outlier: Will Supervillains Be on the Final?
Will Supervillains Be on the Final? (2011)
This one genuinely surprises people. Between Temeraire books, Novik wrote a shojo-style graphic novel about a superhero college, illustrated by Yishan Li. Leah Taymore is a shy transfer student trying not to get expelled from Liberty Vocational, while a supervillain moonlighting as an ethics professor works his way through the student body. It’s a completely different register from anything else on this list, breezy where the rest of her catalogue is dense, and it was clearly meant to launch a longer series that never materialised. Read it as a curiosity rather than a priority, but it’s a fun one if you want to see Novik outside her usual mode entirely.
Novik also has one short story tucked inside Unfettered III: New Tales by Masters of Fantasy (2019), a multi-author charity anthology alongside the likes of Brandon Sanderson and Robin Hobb. It’s not really “a Novik book” in the way anything above is, so it doesn’t get its own entry here, but it’s worth knowing about if you’re a completionist.
How Every Novik Book Rates on Goodreads
For anyone deciding what to prioritise, here’s how the full catalogue scores with readers.
| Book | Series | Published | Goodreads Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| His Majesty’s Dragon | Temeraire #1 | 2006 | 4.07 |
| Throne of Jade | Temeraire #2 | 2006 | 3.91 |
| Black Powder War | Temeraire #3 | 2006 | 3.90 |
| Empire of Ivory | Temeraire #4 | 2007 | 3.99 |
| Victory of Eagles | Temeraire #5 | 2008 | 4.08 |
| Tongues of Serpents | Temeraire #6 | 2010 | 3.77 |
| Crucible of Gold | Temeraire #7 | 2012 | 3.99 |
| Blood of Tyrants | Temeraire #8 | 2013 | 4.00 |
| League of Dragons | Temeraire #9 | 2016 | 4.17 |
| Golden Age and Other Stories | Temeraire (bonus) | 2017 | 4.03 |
| A Deadly Education | Scholomance #1 | 2020 | 3.93 |
| The Last Graduate | Scholomance #2 | 2021 | 4.22 |
| The Golden Enclaves | Scholomance #3 | 2022 | 4.11 |
| Uprooted | Standalone | 2015 | 4.01 |
| Spinning Silver | Standalone | 2018 | 4.17 |
| The Summer War | Standalone | 2025 | 4.00 |
| Buried Deep and Other Stories | Collection | 2023 | 4.01 |
| Will Supervillains Be on the Final? | Liberty Vocational | 2011 | 3.44 |
The Last Graduate edges out the rest of the catalogue in terms of ratings, and Will Supervillains Be on the Final? is the clear outlier at the bottom, less a knock on the writing than a sign it was reaching for a different audience entirely.
Naomi Novik, Where Should You Start?
If you want dragons, war, and a slow-burn found-family plot that takes nine books to pay off properly, start with His Majesty’s Dragon and commit to the whole run, Temeraire doesn’t reward skipping ahead.
If you want something darker, faster, and finished in three books, the Scholomance is the better entry point, and A Deadly Education is one of the strongest opening chapters in recent fantasy. And if you just want to know what the fuss is about without signing up for a series at all, Uprooted or Spinning Silver will tell you everything you need to know about why people keep putting Novik on their reading lists without needing to track a second or third book down afterwards.
Whichever door you go through, log it before you forget half the dragon names like I did somewhere around book six. Litloop’s currently-reading shelf exists for exactly this problem, and it’s a much better place to rant about Laurence’s decision-making than a group chat that’s moved on to something else.
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