Kate Quinn Books in Order

Below is the complete list of Kate Quinn books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.

Empress Of Rome Series

1. Mistress of Rome (2010)
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2. Daughters of Rome (2011)
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3. Empress of the Seven Hills / Empress of Rome (2012)
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4. The Three Fates (2015)
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5. Lady of the Eternal City (2015)
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Borgia Chronicles Series

1. The Serpent and the Pearl (2013)
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2. The Lion and the Rose (2014)
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Standalone Novels Series

1. A Song of War (2016)
   (With Stephanie Thornton, S.J.A. Turney, Christian Cameron, Libbie Hawker, Vicky Alvear Shecter, Russell Whitfield)
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2. The Alice Network / Call Me Alice (2017)
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3. The Huntress (2019)
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4. The Rose Code (2021)
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5. The Diamond Eye (2022)
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6. The Phoenix Crown (2024)
   (With Janie Chang)
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7. The Briar Club (2024)
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8. The Astral Library (2026)
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Short Stories/Novellas Series

1. Smoke Signal (2021)
   (With Marie Benedict)
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2. Signal Moon (2022)
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About Kate Quinn

Kate Quinn is a historical novelist whose career is easiest to understand in two broad movements: first, richly imagined fiction set in the ancient and Renaissance worlds; later, a run of bestselling twentieth-century novels centered on women navigating war, espionage, survival, and reinvention. That shift in subject matter is one of the most interesting things about her bibliography. She did not begin with the Second World War fiction for which many readers now know her best. Her earlier books were set in ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy, and they established her as a writer drawn to political pressure, vivid historical settings, and women whose intelligence matters as much as their courage.

A native of Southern California, Quinn studied at Boston University, where she earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classical voice. That background helps explain the confidence of her earliest novels, which lean into the classical world not as museum material but as something immediate, sensual, and emotionally alive. The Empress of Rome novels, beginning with Mistress of Rome, showed her early interest in power structures, ambition, loyalty, and female agency inside male-dominated systems. The Borgia novels extended that instinct into Renaissance intrigue. Even at this stage, before her biggest commercial breakthrough, the shape of her fiction was already clear: she liked high-stakes historical moments, sharp character contrasts, and stories in which personal choices are inseparable from larger public upheaval.

Her wider breakout came with The Alice Network, which brought her into a much larger readership and helped define the phase of her career most people now associate with her name. That novel, with its dual timeline and its focus on women in espionage and aftermath, crystallized many of Quinn’s strengths. She writes historical fiction with momentum. Her books are researched, but they are not heavy with display. She tends to organize them around strong narrative hooks, emotional urgency, and overlooked or underemphasized corners of history, especially women’s experiences in wartime and politically unstable eras.

From there, novels such as The Huntress, The Rose Code, and The Diamond Eye strengthened her reputation for large-scale, accessible historical fiction built around female protagonists confronting danger from within systems that underestimate them. These books vary in setting and structure, but they share a recognizable authorial signature: tension, moral pressure, vivid ensemble work, and a refusal to flatten history into costume drama. Quinn is especially good at making competence compelling. Her heroines are often resourceful, trained, or intellectually formidable, but they are also emotionally marked by the worlds they inhabit.

Her bibliography is best read not simply as a list of standalones and series, but as a record of expanding historical range. The Roman and Renaissance books reveal where she began; the later twentieth-century novels show where she found her broadest audience. Along the way she also took part in collaborative historical novels with other writers, and more recently co-authored The Phoenix Crown with Janie Chang, another sign that her interests are not confined to one narrow historical lane. With The Briar Club, she moved into McCarthy-era Washington, again showing how comfortably she can relocate her central concerns, especially secrecy, loyalty, female solidarity, and the private cost of public fear.

What ties Quinn’s work together is not one era but one sensibility. She writes history as lived experience: dangerous, intimate, often dark, but never drained of wit or human texture. Her novels tend to foreground women whom official narratives have minimized, yet they do so through strong storytelling rather than abstract correction. That is why her bibliography rewards being read in order. You can see the evolution from an author fascinated by the ancient world into one of the most commercially successful voices in modern historical fiction, while still recognizing the same core instincts underneath. Even with newer directions, including The Astral Library, announced as her first venture into magical realism, the through-line remains clear: she is a novelist drawn to high-pressure worlds, vivid personalities, and the places where history and emotion meet.