Authors I Would Love Another Book From

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature/meme now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. The meme was originally the brainchild of The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is Authors I Would Love Another Book From.

In alphabetical order by last name, because I couldn’t possibly rank them:

(Note: Title links, if they exist, lead to my reviews; author links, if they exist, lead to lists of my reviews.)

Agatha Christie – As prolific as Christie was, I wish there were a few more Miss Marple mysteries, as well as a few more books in the vein of The Secret Adversary, The Secret of Chimneys, and The Seven Dials Mystery. Thankfully, she did leave us a substantial body of works (pun intended), and I reread them periodically, particularly my favorites. But it’s not like having a new book to look forward to (something I never experienced with Christie, since I discovered her books right around the time of her death.) And no, much as I enjoyed some of the stories in Marple: 12 New Mysteries, they don’t count; nor do so Sophie Hannah’s Poirot novels.

Zenna Henderson – Henderson wrote a series of stories and books about the People: gentle, benevolent psychically- or magically-gifted refugees from a planetary disaster whose ships crash-landed in the American West before or around the turn of the 20th century (though many of the stories take place in the 1920s–50s.) My description doesn’t do the books justice; the People captured my imagination and heart as a teen, and I wish Henderson had been granted more time to share their stories.

Lisa Kleypas – Kleypas is one of my favorite historical romance authors. She seems to have disappeared from public view sometime during the pandemic, following the publication of Devil in Disguise. At one point, I believe her website even disappeared. It’s back up now, but there’s no indication of where she has been, whether she is still writing, or even whether she is still alive (other than the lack of an obituary.) While I suspect her author friends may know something, I haven’t seen a single hint in social media or online anywhere, and I can only guess that the conspicuous silence is at the request of either Ms. Kleypas or her family. I wish her the very best, and hope that one day she returns to writing.

Katherine Kurtz – Kurtz’s Deryni novels were well-known and well-beloved by fantasy readers in the latter part of the 20th century and into the 2000s for her Deryni novels, which, although set in a secondary world, drew heavily on English and European medieval and Renaissance history and culture. she was one of my foundational authors as I transitioned from middle grade and young adult fantasy into adult fantasy. Her last novel was published in 2014, and although she is still living, and was interacting with fans as of a few years ago, it appears she may have retired from writing—reasonable, given that she is now 80 years old. nonetheless, I wish we could look forward to another Deryni novel, or even another book in her contemporary fantasy series (The Adept.)

Madeleine L’Engle – When I heard L’Engle had died, I wept. As a tween and teen, I loved her MG/YA contemporary fantasy, beginning with A Wrinkle in Time. In my late teens and early 20s, I fell in love with her memoirs (beginning with A Circle of Quiet) and her spiritual writings, and explored some of her fiction for adults (although at the time, I suspect I lacked the experience to properly appreciate the latter.) Even now, I reread my favorite books every four or five years, and wish she were still around to extend the history of the Murray-O’Keefe family or share her thoughts on the joys and challenges of life, of writing, and of faith.

Anne McCaffrey – McCaffrey is another whose death made me cry. Like Kurtz, McCaffrey had a huge impact on me as a teen and adult reader of science fiction and fantasy.* I devoured her Pern novels about genetically-engineered dragons and their riders (beginning with the Dragonriders of Pern trilogy), along with her tales of brainships, psychically-gifted Talents, and Doonan colonists, rereading my favorites over and over. (Among these was Restoree, one of the few pre–1970 science fiction novels to feature a female main character with agency and spunk.) But the Pern books were and remain my favorites. Although McCaffrey collaborated with her son Todd on several Pern novels before turning the series over to him, I never felt those books were quite in keeping with the flavor and world building of the books Anne McCaffrey wrote on her own. I would give a lot for one more Pern novel authored by Anne herself.

*I say “fantasy” although in fact McCaffrey always maintained she wrote science fiction, not fantasy. Still, despite the science fiction underpinnings, the majority of the Pern series feels very much like fantasy.

Robin McKinley – Three of McKinley’s fantasy novels (Beauty, The Blue Sword, and Spindle’s End) are among my favorite fantasy novels ever, and I have liked and reread almost everything she has written. McKinley has never been a particularly fast writer, so I’m used to it being a while between books. But her most recent novel was Shadows in 2013, and as far as I can tell, she has been struggling with writer’s block ever since. This is understandable, given her husband’s illness and death and her own struggles with ME/CFS, but as someone who loves her books, it’s a little disheartening to think we might not ever get another. She does sporadically update her blog; the last update was in October 2023, but did not include any mention of writing. So while I would love another McKinley novel or two (or three), I fear I am not optimistic.

Ellis Peters – Peters was best known in the US as the author of the Brother Cadfael historical mysteries set in medieval Britain. Much as I loved those, I was equally fond of most of her Felse mysteries featuring Inspector George Felse and/or his son Dominic (and in one case his wife Bunty.) Among my favorites is The Piper on the Mountain. Peters also wrote several standalone mysteries, including several other favorites like Never Pick Up Hitchhikers and Death Mask. She was an excellent storyteller and writer, and I dearly wish I could look forward to more of her novels.

Tamora Pierce – Pierce has been a best-selling YA fantasy novelist since the 1980s, and for good reason. I only wish I had discovered her books back then. When I finally read Pierce (in the early 2000s) I fell in love with her tales of female knights (the Song of the Lioness and Protector of the Small quartets) and shape-shifting Wildmage (the Immortals quartet) set in the medieval-inspired world of Tortall. Pierce’s Circle of Magic series is equally good. Tempests & Slaughter, the first Tortall novel with a male main character (Numair), came out in 2018, with two sequels planned, and another trilogy promised beyond that. Alas, there has been no word on the second Numair novel; Tammy was hospitalized in 2019, and I have heard rumors that she has had some health issues more recently. I sincerely hope that she will be able to complete the Numair trilogy, but I have to admit that I’m not optimistic.

Bee Ridgway – Ridgway only wrote two books, but the first was terrific and the second was good. The River of No Return (2013) is a heady blend of historical fiction, time-travel fantasy, romance, and suspense or intrigue, absolutely peppered with literary and pop-culture references both subtle and overt; I loved it. Ridgway wrote one related novella, released a year afterward, but although The River of No Return left ample loose ends for a sequel, and her Goodreads biography indicated she was working on one, Ridgway seems to have dropped off the face of the earth sometime in 2014. Her website is gone, the domain name taken by what appears to be a Chinese company, and she hasn’t posted anything to Twitter/X since 2014, leaving me (and I assume the rest of her fans) wondering what happened to her.

Patrick Rothfuss – I have heard more than one fantasy author describe Rothfuss as a writer’s writer, or express awe and admiration for the man’s talent, and I wholeheartedly agree. The Name of the Wind (2007) absolutely blew me away when I first listened to it; in my review, I called it “a tour de force of fantasy writing, the most amazing and spellbinding book I’ve come across in years”— and I wasn’t exaggerating. The sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear (2011), only cemented Rothfuss’s place in the canon of great fantasy authors. Alas for me and the rest of his fans, Pat has only released a few related short stories and novellas in the nearly 13 years since The Wise Man’s Fear. Some of the delay has been due to writer’s block stemming from the enormous fan expectations for the third book in the series. Some is probably due to Pat’s perfectionism as a writer, and (I suspect) to his desire to fulfill all the promises made to his readers in the first two books, and explain all the clues he sprinkled throughout books #1 and #2. And some may be due to all the other activities he’s been involved in, from his World Builders charitable organization to tabletop and RPG gaming, and of course his family. Whatever the cause, those of us who haven’t given up or gone away in a rage are still patiently (or impatiently) waiting for The Doors of Stone. I only hope he finishes it while I am still around to read it.

Dorothy Sayers – My entire family are fans of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, from Whose Body? (the first book) to Sayers’s last book in the series, Busman’s Honeymoon. I have been reading and rereading them since high school, and I never tire of them. Decades after Sayers’s death, Jill Paton Walsh was asked to complete Sayers’ unfinished manuscript for Thrones, Dominations, the sequel to Busman’s Honeymoon, and Walsh did a pretty good job. Her subsequent novels, extending the series into WWII and beyond, are also good, but they don’t quite rise to the Sayers standard. Even if I hadn’t known they were written by someone other than Sayers herself, I would have sensed a change in the style and feel of the writing. I sincerely wish Sayers had graced us with more books about Lord Peter, Bunter, and Harriet.

Mary Stewart – Like many of the other authors on this list, my love for Mary Stewart goes back to my early teens. I started with Stewart’s Arthurian novels, back when there were only two of them, but quickly fell in love with her romantic adventure/suspense novels as well. And it’s these that I wish for more of — not the later works like Stormy Petrel and The Rose Cottage (which I never really warmed to) but novels like This Rough Magic, The Gabriel Hounds, Nine Coaches Waiting, and Airs Above the Ground.

Which authors do you most wish would (or could) write another book?

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