Alex Verus Series

The Alex Verus series is a sequence of urban fantasy novels that I published between 2012 and 2021. It follows the story of Alex Verus, a mage with a dark past who runs a magic shop in the Camden Town district of north-west London.

Alex Verus is a diviner: a mage whose magical talent gives him the ability to perceive the short-term consequences of any action he takes. By searching through possible futures and selecting the actions that will lead to them, he can do things such as dodge attacks, throw objects with perfect accuracy, and guess someone’s password on the first try. This is impressive to normal people but less so to other mages, whose magic types let them do things such as teleport, disintegrate things, throw fireballs, or fly.

Mages in the Alex Verus setting are split into Light and Dark factions (NB: ‘Light’ does not mean ‘good’). Alex was apprenticed to a Dark mage in his youth and it ended very badly. As a result, by the start of the series, Alex is on bad terms with both Dark mages and the Light Council, and would really much rather just run his shop and be left alone. Fate, however, has other plans.

And so began Fated, the first Alex Verus novel, released in March 2012. Eleven more books followed, with the twelfth and final one, Risen, being released in December 2021. The series was published in both British and American editions, and as of 2021 has been translated into German, French, Russian, Czech, and Swedish. The main series is now at an end, though I still publish Alex Verus novellas from time to time.

If you’re looking for information on a specific Alex Verus book, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on one of the images – otherwise, keep reading!

Extracts

I typically put the first chapter of each of my books online a month or two before that book’s release. In the case of the Alex Verus series, that means you can read the first chapters of all twelve books online for free. Each of the book pages above has a link to that book’s first chapter, or you can find all twelve extracts collected right here.

Encyclopaedia

Between 2012 and 2014, I wrote a series of worldbuilding articles for the Alex Verus setting called the Encyclopaedia Arcana. It covers topics such as:

how magic works in the Alex Verus universe,
the three families of magic,
mages, adepts, and normals,
the Concord,
the Council,
other worlds (bubbles and shadow realms),
the apprenticeship system,
and an overview of the fifteen or so most common magic types.

If you’d like to learn more about the world of Alex Verus, go take a look!

Ask Luna

Ask Luna is a series of posts where readers write in with questions for Luna, one of the characters in the Alex Verus series. As of 2023, there are close on two hundred posts, containing answers to an average of four or five questions each. You can read past answers here, or write in with your own question here. Note that Luna answers questions entirely at her own discretion, and readers are advised that they approach her at their own risk.

Novellas

As of 2021, the Alex Verus series is complete, and I have no plans to write any further novels in the series. However, I do occasionally write novellas in the same setting that work as side stories and which usually come in at around 20% to 30% of the length of a full Alex Verus novel. As of 2023, I’ve published two, with more planned. If you’re interested, they’re available on my store page here!

Author Commentaries

Over the course of 2021, as the Alex Verus series was drawing to a close, I wrote a sequence of posts providing commentary on the books – one per novel, plus a few more. For those of you who’ve already read the series and would like to learn a bit more about how each book came to be written and what was going on in the background as the Alex Verus series was created, come take a look at the index post that I wrote in April 2021. Warning: each post contains spoilers for the book in question and won’t make that much sense unless you’ve read the actual book first.