Cassandra Clare Books in Order: Complete Shadowhunters Reading Guide (2026)

The Shadowhunter Chronicles is one of the most expansive fantasy universes in young adult fiction — over 20 books spanning multiple time periods, from the gaslit streets of Victorian London to the demon-hunting clubs of modern New York. The reading order is famously confusing. Multiple series overlap in their publication dates, characters appear and reappear across timelines, and starting in the wrong place will spoil major reveals in other series. This guide gives you the correct path through the entire universe.

The short version: begin with City of Bones. Do not deviate from that advice.

All Cassandra Clare Books at a Glance

Best starting point: City of Bones — the foundation of the entire universe; do not start anywhere else.

Start Here: The Mortal Instruments

The Mortal Instruments is the original series — six books following Clary Fray, a teenager in New York who discovers she is a Shadowhunter, a race of half-angel warriors who hunt demons. The series launched in 2007 and established the entire mythology of the Shadowhunter Chronicles: the Nephilim, Downworlders, the Clave, the runes, the conflicts between species that recur across every subsequent series.

The six books split naturally into two trilogies. The first — Books 1 through 3 — tells a complete story with a satisfying ending. The second — Books 4 through 6 — is a sequel trilogy that expands the universe, introduces new characters who become central to later series, and builds toward the enormous climax of City of Heavenly Fire. Both trilogies need to be read before moving to The Dark Artifices.

1. City of Bones (2007) — Start here; establishes the entire universe
2. City of Ashes (2008)
3. City of Glass (2009) — Natural end of the original trilogy
4. City of Fallen Angels (2011) — Begin the sequel trilogy here
5. City of Lost Souls (2012)
6. City of Heavenly Fire (2014) — The largest book in the series; concludes TMI

After City of Glass, you have a genuine choice. Many readers find this the right moment to detour into The Infernal Devices — the Victorian prequel series, often considered the best books in the entire universe — before returning for Books 4 through 6. That reading path works. What does not work is reading The Infernal Devices before City of Bones; Clare plants references in TID that only land correctly if you already know the modern characters and their history.

The Infernal Devices (Victorian London — Read After TMI Books 1–3)

The Infernal Devices is set in 1878 London, following a group of Shadowhunters at the London Institute. Tessa Gray arrives in England seeking her brother and finds herself entangled with the Institute’s most complicated residents: Will Herondale, who is deliberately cruel for reasons he refuses to explain, and Jem Carstairs, Will’s parabatai and closest companion, whose quiet warmth is the emotional centre of the trilogy.

The Will/Jem/Tessa dynamic is the reason fans consistently name this the peak of the Shadowhunter universe. The Victorian setting gives Clare room she doesn’t have in the modern series — the historical world slows everything down, makes the relationships more formal and therefore more charged, and the tragedy built into the trilogy from its earliest pages gives Clockwork Princess an emotional weight that few YA novels manage.

1. Clockwork Angel (2010)
2. Clockwork Prince (2011)
3. Clockwork Princess (2013) — Widely regarded as the emotional peak of the entire universe

Clockwork Princess has the reputation it does for good reason. Clare sets up an apparent tragic binary across the trilogy — the reader is led to believe that only one resolution to the central conflict is possible — and then finds a third path that is both completely surprising and completely earned by what preceded it. Finishing it at two in the morning and being unable to sleep is a shared experience among fans.

The Dark Artifices (Read After TMI Books 1–6)

The Dark Artifices picks up five years after the events of City of Heavenly Fire and follows Emma Carstairs and Julian Blackthorn at the Los Angeles Institute. The series is longer and more complex than its predecessors — both Lord of Shadows and Queen of Air and Darkness are very long books — and it requires having read all six Mortal Instruments novels before beginning, as several characters and plot threads carry directly over from City of Heavenly Fire.

The central conflict — a forbidden parabatai romance, which carries catastrophic consequences within Shadowhunter law — is Clare’s most ambitious structural choice in the series. The trilogy sets it up across three books before paying it off in Queen of Air and Darkness.

1. Lady Midnight (2016)
2. Lord of Shadows (2017)
3. Queen of Air and Darkness (2019)

The Last Hours and The Eldest Curses

Two further series complete the current Shadowhunter Chronicles, though both remain outside our main catalogue.

The Last Hours is a Victorian trilogy set in the early 1900s, following the children of Will, Jem, and Tessa from The Infernal Devices alongside the next generation of London Institute Shadowhunters. It comprises Chain of Gold (2020), Chain of Iron (2021), and Chain of Thorns (2023). If The Infernal Devices is your favourite series — as it is for many readers — The Last Hours functions as a continuation of that world. Reading it requires having finished both The Infernal Devices and The Dark Artifices first; several characters and consequences from TDA appear directly.

The Eldest Curses is a companion trilogy focusing on Magnus Bane, the High Warlock of Brooklyn who appears throughout the entire Shadowhunter universe as a recurring and beloved supporting character. Co-written with Wesley Chu, the trilogy comprises The Red Scrolls of Magic (2019), The Lost Book of the White (2020), and The Black Volume of the Dead (2022). It follows Magnus and Alec Lightwood — characters central to The Mortal Instruments — in the years after City of Heavenly Fire. Readers who want more Magnus will find these deeply satisfying; they are lighter in tone than the main series and function as adventure stories with a strong romantic centre.

Short story collections — including The Bane Chronicles and Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy — fill in gaps across the universe and are best read after whichever series they relate to most closely.

The Complete Recommended Reading Order

For a reader beginning the Shadowhunter Chronicles from scratch, this is the sequence that avoids spoilers and builds understanding across the universe in the right order:

1. City of Bones — The Mortal Instruments Book 1
2. City of Ashes — The Mortal Instruments Book 2
3. City of Glass — The Mortal Instruments Book 3
4. Clockwork Angel — The Infernal Devices Book 1
5. Clockwork Prince — The Infernal Devices Book 2
6. Clockwork Princess — The Infernal Devices Book 3
7. City of Fallen Angels — The Mortal Instruments Book 4
8. City of Lost Souls — The Mortal Instruments Book 5
9. City of Heavenly Fire — The Mortal Instruments Book 6
10. The Red Scrolls of Magic — The Eldest Curses Book 1
11. Lady Midnight — The Dark Artifices Book 1
12. Lord of Shadows — The Dark Artifices Book 2
13. The Lost Book of the White — The Eldest Curses Book 2
14. Queen of Air and Darkness — The Dark Artifices Book 3
15. The Black Volume of the Dead — The Eldest Curses Book 3
16. Chain of Gold — The Last Hours Book 1
17. Chain of Iron — The Last Hours Book 2
18. Chain of Thorns — The Last Hours Book 3

The placement of The Infernal Devices after City of Glass rather than after City of Heavenly Fire is a deliberate recommendation. Reading TID while the original TMI characters are still fresh — before the sequel trilogy — makes the callbacks in Books 4 through 6 more meaningful, and the emotional experience of Clockwork Princess benefits from arriving before the heavier darkness of City of Heavenly Fire rather than after it.

The Mortal Instruments vs The Infernal Devices — Which is Better?

This is the central debate in the Shadowhunter fandom, and it is worth addressing directly before you commit several hundred hours to the universe.

The Mortal Instruments is the entry point and the foundation. It establishes the world, introduces the mythology, and follows Clary Fray’s transformation from an ordinary teenager into a Shadowhunter. The first three books are propulsive urban fantasy — fast-paced, inventive, and effective at building the sense of a world that runs parallel to the real one. Their weaknesses are mainly the weaknesses of debut fiction: some characterisation is thin, the pacing in Books 4 and 5 loses momentum, and the scale of the sequel trilogy occasionally outstrips its emotional grounding.

The Infernal Devices is what happens when Clare has more confidence and more room to manoeuvre. The Victorian setting imposes a discipline that the contemporary New York books don’t have. The central triangle — Will, Jem, Tessa — is drawn with more care than the equivalent relationships in TMI, and the tragedy seeded into it from the opening chapters gives the trilogy a cumulative weight that Clockwork Princess deploys at full force. It is also a better constructed series: the mystery at the heart of Clockwork Angel pays off more satisfyingly than the equivalent reveals in City of Bones, and the character work across all three books is more sustained.

The honest recommendation: finish The Mortal Instruments first, because you need the foundation and because TID contains spoilers for TMI. But do not be discouraged if Books 4 and 5 test your patience. City of Heavenly Fire rewards it. And The Infernal Devices, which you can begin after Book 3, will likely be the series you remember most.

The TV Show and Films

Cassandra Clare’s work has reached two generations of new readers through screen adaptations, and both bring in audiences who need the reading order laid out clearly.

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013), directed by Harald Zwart and starring Lily Collins as Clary, was a reasonably faithful film adaptation of the first book. It performed modestly at the box office and a planned sequel was cancelled, but it introduced Clare’s world to a broader audience and remains watchable for fans of the series.

Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments (2016–2019) ran for three seasons on Freeform and is a much more substantial adaptation — 55 episodes covering a compressed and significantly altered version of all six TMI novels, with elements of later series worked in. The cast, particularly Matthew Daddario as Alec and Harry Shum Jr. as Magnus, built a devoted fanbase. The show was cancelled after Season 3 despite strong viewer numbers, and the resulting fan campaign to save it became one of the more organised fandom advocacy efforts in recent television history.

Both adaptations take significant liberties with the source material. The show in particular restructures character arcs and relationship timelines substantially. Readers who arrive via the screen adaptations will find the books both familiar and considerably different — and the books, almost uniformly, have the richer versions of the stories being told.

For the Best Fantasy Books

For the definitive guide to fantasy fiction — from Tolkien and Le Guin to Brandon Sanderson and George R.R. Martin — see our Best Fantasy Books of All Time list.

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For the full Cassandra Clare bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Cassandra Clare author page on Editors Reads.

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