Stephanie Garber

Stephanie Garber is an American author best known for the Caraval trilogy, beginning with Caraval in 2017, which follows sisters drawn into a wildly theatrical, dangerous game-slash-performance where the line between illusion and real danger is never quite clear. The books built a devoted readership for their lush, fairy-tale-adjacent prose and puzzle-box plotting, and Garber followed them with the Once Upon a Broken Heart series, a companion trilogy centered on a supporting Caraval character that expands the same world in a new direction.

Garber taught writing and literature at the college level before her fiction career took off, and Caraval reportedly sold in a competitive auction after drawing comparisons to The Night Circus and Alice in Wonderland for its atmosphere and structure. Both her YA series share a throughline of sisters, found family, and morally ambiguous magical figures whose motives are never fully clear until late in each story. In 2025 she published her first novel for adult readers, Alchemy of Secrets, an old-Hollywood dark-academia urban fantasy that launched a planned duology and became an instant New York Times bestseller.

A new reader should start with Caraval for the original YA trilogy, Once Upon a Broken Heart for the companion series' fairy-tale romance framing, or Alchemy of Secrets for her adult fiction -- the three are unconnected worlds, though Caraval came first chronologically. There is no film or TV adaptation to date; the books have built their following primarily through a strong readership among fantasy and romantasy readers.