Katherine Addison is the name Sarah Monette has written under since The Goblin Emperor arrived in 2014 and quietly carried off the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel (with nods from the Hugos, Nebulas and World Fantasy Awards besides). If you've ever wished for a fantasy that is kind to the people living inside it, this is your shelf.
Most of her Addison novels share a single world — the Chronicles of Osreth — and they all keep the same gentle, hopeful temperament: cold courts survived through patience, mysteries unpicked with care rather than violence. Readers new to her usually want to know which are the best ones, where to start and what reading order to follow, and happily the answer is an easy one.
Begin with The Goblin Emperor, which stands entirely on its own, and let the rest of the world open out from there at whatever pace suits you. It is good company for a long, quiet evening.
On our shelves
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The Goblin Emperor
The half-goblin youngest son, exiled and unloved, is suddenly emperor after an airship crash kills his family, and must navigate a cold elven court armed only with decency. It's a quiet book about being kind in a place that punishes kindness, dense with formal names and tea. Read it when you want to root for someone good.
Where to start
Start with The Goblin Emperor. It's the standalone, Locus Award-winning novel that opens the world and sets her signature gentle, hopeful tone, and every other book here grows outward from it. If you'd like more afterwards, the Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy follows in order: The Witness for the Dead, then The Grief of Stones, then The Tomb of Dragons.
Katherine Addison’s books
The half-goblin youngest son, exiled and unloved, is suddenly emperor after an airship crash takes his father and elder brothers — and must hold a hostile court together with kindness and patience. A standalone, and the book everything else here grows out of.
On our shelves →Thara Celehar, a quiet cleric who can speak with the recently dead, sets out to learn who murdered an opera singer in the city of Amalo. The gentle first book of the Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy.
Celehar takes on an apprentice and, before long, a darker case, his quiet casework as a Witness for the Dead deepening. The second of the Cemeteries of Amalo novels.
The third and concluding Cemeteries of Amalo novel, which sees Thara Celehar's story in Amalo to its close.
A standalone novella back in the world of The Goblin Emperor: a disgraced history student, framed for theft, tries to clear his name by solving a puzzle left behind by a friend killed in the airship explosion that opens that novel.
Her book for the darker evenings — Sherlock Holmes remade in a supernatural 1880s London, where the detective is an angel called Crow and his companion is cursed to become a hellhound. It includes the Jack the Ripper murders, so not strictly cosy, but unmistakably hers.
Good questions
Begin with The Goblin Emperor (2014), a standalone and the natural way in. Then the Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy in order: The Witness for the Dead (2021), The Grief of Stones (2022) and The Tomb of Dragons (2025). The Orb of Cairado (2026) is a separate novella set around the events of The Goblin Emperor.
A standalone. It shares its world with the Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy, which stars Thara Celehar — a minor character from it — but you needn't read on unless you want to.
Yes. Sarah Monette is her own name; Katherine Addison is the pen name she has used since The Goblin Emperor. Under Monette she wrote the four-book Doctrine of Labyrinths and, with Elizabeth Bear, the Iskryne novels.
She's best known for gentle, character-driven, hopeful fantasy that readers have taken to heart as comfort reading; the warmth comes from decency and quiet competence rather than spectacle. The Angel of the Crows is the exception — a darker Holmes reimagining that includes the Ripper murders.
The Tomb of Dragons (2025) closes the Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy, and The Orb of Cairado (2026) is a new standalone novella set in the world of The Goblin Emperor.
Not strictly. The Cemeteries of Amalo books share the world and borrow a minor character, but they read largely on their own. Even so, The Goblin Emperor is such a lovely introduction that most readers are glad to have started there.
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