Mistborn Books in Order

The Mistborn Series is a landmark fantasy franchise written by Brandon Sanderson, set in a world of ash falls, mists, and oppressive imperial rule that turns out to be far more complicated than it initially appears. The original trilogy begins with a fundamental inversion of epic fantasy conventions: the Dark Lord won a thousand years ago, and the world has been living under his reign ever since. A crew of thieves and rebels, led by the charismatic Kelsier and including the young street orphan Vin, plans to overthrow the immortal Lord Ruler using Allomancy — a magic system in which practitioners swallow and "burn" metals to gain specific supernatural abilities.

Sanderson's hallmark is his extraordinarily detailed and internally consistent magic systems, and Allomancy is among his finest creations: each of the sixteen metals produces a specific and logical effect, the rules are established clearly and then exploited with creative precision in the action sequences, and the magic has genuine strategic and social implications that Sanderson works out across the full series. The world-building is equally rigorous, and the plot twists — which recontextualise everything that came before — are among the most genuinely surprising in recent fantasy.

The series comprises two distinct eras: the original trilogy (The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, The Hero of Ages) set in the pre-industrial period, and a second era of four novels set three centuries later in a world that has industrialised. All 7 novels published from 2006 to 2022 belong to Sanderson's vast Cosmere universe. Read the original trilogy first, then the second era novels in order.