About the author
V. E. Schwab is an American fantasy writer born Victoria Elizabeth Schwab. She publishes most adult fiction as V. E. Schwab and has used Victoria Schwab for children's and young adult books. She studied at Washington University in St. Louis and began publishing novels in 2011.
Her best-known work includes Vicious and its Villains sequence, the parallel-London adventures of the Shades of Magic series, and the standalone The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. The range is wide—superpowers, portal fantasy, ghosts, immortality—but the stories repeatedly ask what a desired freedom costs once it has been granted.
Schwab often builds fantasy around a rule that is easy to state and difficult to live with. Addie LaRue can escape an unwanted life but cannot be remembered; the rivals in Vicious gain extraordinary abilities through death and return; the travelers in Shades of Magic can cross worlds that remain closed to almost everyone else.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil follows immortal women across several centuries. It returns to that pattern of appetite and exchange, treating immortality not as an abstract gift but as a condition that changes love, memory, hunger, and the power one person can hold over another.
Where to start
Start with Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil if you want a self-contained dark fantasy. For Schwab's wider catalogue, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is another standalone about immortality and its price, while A Darker Shade of Magic opens her best-known series.
