V.E. Schwab

V.E. Schwab is an American fantasy author whose The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and A Darker Shade of Magic have made her one of the most popular writers working in commercial fantasy.

V.E. Schwab (who also writes as Victoria Schwab for younger readers) has built an extraordinarily productive career in commercial fantasy, publishing more than twenty books and establishing herself as one of the genre’s most consistently popular voices. A Darker Shade of Magic opens her Shades of Magic trilogy, set in parallel Londons with varying relationships to magic, and combines world-building inventiveness with a genuinely enjoyable adventure plot. Kell, a rare magician who can travel between the Londons, and Lila, a thief from a magicless Grey London, make an appealing pair, and Schwab balances action and atmosphere with more skill than most commercial fantasy manages.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is her most ambitious and personal work: the story of a young woman in eighteenth-century France who makes a deal with a dark god to live forever, with the price that no one will ever remember her. The novel alternates between Addie’s three-hundred-year life and a contemporary storyline in which she meets, inexplicably, a man who remembers her. It is a meditation on memory, legacy, and the question of what a life means if it leaves no trace, and it is Schwab’s most emotionally complex work.

Schwab is sometimes criticized for a certain sameness of prose style and for plotting that prioritizes momentum over depth, and these are fair observations. But her books are reliably absorbing, and at her best — in Addie LaRue — she writes with genuine feeling.