Heir

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death.

Sabaa Tahir is a New York Times bestselling Pakistani-American author best known for her young adult fantasy series An Ember in the Ashes. She grew up in the Mojave Desert, California, and attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she earned a degree in political science. After graduation, she began her professional career as a journalist at The Washington Post, working as a copy editor for their foreign news desk. During her time there, Tahir noticed how many stories were of people suffering due to war, particularly people of color, which heavily informed her later fiction.

In 2015, Tahir published her debut novel, An Ember in the Ashes, the first in a bestselling series set in a brutal world inspired by the culture and folklore of ancient Rome and the Middle East. It follows Laia, an enslaved woman fighting for her family’s survival, and Elias, a soldier questioning his allegiance to a tyrannical empire. The novel was met with critical acclaim and praised for its world-building, complex characters, exploration of oppression, courage, and resistance. It was followed by three sequels: A Torch Against the Night (2016), A Reaper at the Gates (2018), and A Sky Beyond the Storm (2020). Heir is the first book in the sequel duology, set two decades after the original quartet. In addition to her fantasy series, Tahir has also written contemporary young adult fiction. Her 2022 novel, All My Rage, is a standalone novel that draws on her own experiences growing up in the Mojave and deals with family, grief, and forgiveness. The novel won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2022, as well as the Michael L. Printz Award and Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award in 2023.