Lauren Roberts

Lauren Roberts is one of BookTok's biggest publishing success stories: she started writing Powerless at eighteen in 2020, self-published it in November 2023 under her TikTok handle @laurenrobertslibrary, and watched it go viral fast enough to land a deal with Simon & Schuster within months. She was still in her early twenties when it became a New York Times bestseller and a full-blown BookTok phenomenon. Powerless is set in the kingdom of Ilya, where Elite citizens are born with supernatural abilities and Ordinaries have none, and have been quietly hunted for years. Paedyn Gray is an Ordinary who has survived by hiding in plain sight, until she is swept into a brutal royal competition designed to showcase Elite power and has to fake an ability she doesn't have in front of people who could kill her for the truth. Two Elite princes complicate everything further, giving the series its central romantic tension. Roberts leans hard into Hunger Games-style competition stakes crossed with a forbidden-identity love triangle, told in short, addictive chapters built for bingeing. The core trilogy, Powerless, Reckless, Fearless, is complete, rounded out by two companion novellas, Powerful and Fearful, told from supporting characters' points of view. New readers should start with Powerless itself and read in publication order.