The Cruel Prince (Folk of the Air) in Order

Why this order?

The Folk of the Air is best read the way it was published, so for the core story the publication order and the reading order are one and the same. Start with The Cruel Prince (2018), where mortal Jude Duarte claws for power in the faerie realm of Elfhame, then continue through The Wicked King (2019) and The Queen of Nothing (2019). These three novels form one continuous arc with hard cliffhangers between them, and reading them out of sequence would spoil every major reveal, so the trilogy is the spine of this list.

There is also a short companion novella, The Lost Sisters (2018), that slots between The Cruel Prince and The Wicked King. It retells events from Taryn Duarte's perspective and deepens the sisters' rift, but it is optional: you can read it right after The Cruel Prince for extra context, or skip it entirely without losing the main thread. We place it in publication order between the first two novels and leave it out of the trilogy-only path.

After the trilogy, finish with How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories (2020). It is a companion rather than a fourth main book, and it is more than a victory lap: it spans before, during, and after the trilogy, with prequel material on Cardan's neglected childhood and the troll Aslog, interstitial scenes recast in Cardan's point of view, and an epilogue that lands far more sweetly once you know how the trilogy ends. That is the one real gotcha here, so do not pick it up first; it assumes you already know the characters and the trilogy's final beats.

If you want more of Elfhame afterward, Holly Black continues the world in The Stolen Heir duology, The Stolen Heir (2023) and The Prisoner's Throne (2024), set years later and following Oak and Suren, with Jude and Cardan in the background. Readers who love this court-intrigue, morally grey faerie style often move on to Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses or Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse.