Below is the complete list of The War of Lost Hearts books in reading order, presented in publication order for the series by Carissa Broadbent. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
The War of Lost Hearts Series
- Daughter of No Worlds (2020)
- Children of Fallen Gods (2021)
- Mother of Death and Dawn (2022)
- Ashen Son (2022)
About The War of Lost Hearts Series
Carissa Broadbent’s The War of Lost Hearts is the series that most clearly shows the epic-fantasy side of her work. Where Crowns of Nyaxia often reaches readers first through its sharper court intrigue and vampire-centered hooks, The War of Lost Hearts is broader, heavier, and more overtly shaped by war, displacement, institutional power, and the long consequences of violence. It is a completed trilogy built around Tisaanah, with a prequel novella, Ashen Son, tied to Max’s backstory. The main spine of the series, though, begins with Daughter of No Worlds, and that is the entry point that matters most for understanding how the trilogy was designed to unfold.
The series opens with a personal struggle for freedom, but it grows quickly into something much larger. Broadbent uses that expansion well. The books do not simply scale upward in terms of danger; they deepen in political and emotional complexity. Tisaanah’s story is not framed as a decorative romance dropped into a fantasy setting. Her past, her ambitions, and the systems she is trying to survive and resist all shape the direction of the trilogy. That grounding is one reason the series feels more substantial than many fantasy romances that rely mainly on chemistry and atmosphere.
Maxantarius Farlione is equally central to the series’ identity. His presence gives the books one of their defining tensions: the collision between an idealistic drive toward justice and a much more battered, skeptical understanding of what war actually does to people. Broadbent is especially strong when writing characters who are emotionally marked by history rather than merely reacting to the current plot. That gives the trilogy a lived-in sense of damage, duty, and restraint. Even at its most romantic, the story keeps returning to grief, sacrifice, memory, and the moral compromises demanded by conflict.
Publication order matters here because the trilogy is built on cumulative revelation and escalating consequence. Later books depend not only on prior plot developments but on the gradual transformation of the characters’ relationships to power, to one another, and to the wider world. Children of Fallen Gods broadens the scale considerably, and Mother of Death and Dawn works as a true payoff volume, drawing together the personal, political, and magical strands Broadbent has been tightening from the start. Reading out of order would flatten that careful progression.
The prequel novella sometimes raises a practical question for new readers. Because Ashen Son centers Max before the trilogy proper, some readers wonder whether it should come first. In practice, the main trilogy reads best beginning with Daughter of No Worlds. That preserves the intended introduction to the world, the central relationships, and the larger conflict. The novella is useful as supplementary context, but it is not the structural foundation of the series in the way the first novel is.
Tonally, The War of Lost Hearts is dark, emotional, and serious without becoming inert or overworked. Broadbent writes in a direct, accessible style, but the themes are weighty: enslavement, war, oppression, trauma, and the cost of trying to build something better in a world designed to break people. The romance matters, but it is inseparable from the larger story of survival and resistance. That combination is what makes the trilogy distinctive. It offers emotional intensity, but it earns that intensity through character history, political scale, and genuine narrative pressure.
Taken as a whole, The War of Lost Hearts is best understood as Broadbent’s most sweeping and classically epic series: a fantasy built not just on love under pressure, but on the belief that freedom, justice, and healing come at a price no one escapes unchanged.