3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Cosmopolitan
Your Guide to All the ‘Outlander' Books in Order and ‘Blood of My Blood'
Adaptation babes! Have you put off reading Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series after devouring season after season of Claire and Jamie goodness on Starz? Bookmark this primer before you get out an actual bookmark–here's what you need to know about how to read the Outlander books in order, what supplemental stories you might want to pepper into your time-traveling adventure, and whether the prequel, Blood of My Blood is based on anything.
It's not as simple as just going through the series of books as they were released, because Gabaldon has written a ton of novellas, short stories, and a whole spin-off series about a supporting character. How you choose to go about integrating all of the books, if you do choose to do so, is entirely up to you. I've included release dates for every work, so you could just go through them chronologically by when they came out. I almost always prefer reading things in release order, rather than "timeline order" (some of the novellas and spin-offs are prequels) when there's a choice. But, at least when it comes to the novellas, you can skip around!
So far, more or less, each book corresponds to a season of the Starz series. Season 1 is Outlander, season 2 is Dragonfly in Amber, and so on. Season 7, part 2 is airing right now, and one of the last episodes of this season is named "Written in My Heart's Own Blood," which implies that we might start to get season 8 plots.
If you've seen the series and want to read the books but want to skip ahead for whatever reason—maybe you don't want to deal with Randall, or can't wait to get to Brianna and Roger—it should be pretty easy to figure out where to jump in. Maybe you want to skip right to the books that haven't been adapted yet. That's okay, too!
Do you feel like there's not enough Lord John, the British sweetie who rolls in once a season and gets up to stuff while making heart eyes at Jamie? I have great news for you. There are many books and novellas about the fan-favorite character AND they're mysteries AND Jamie is in more than one of them. How fun is that?!
If you want more miscellaneous reading, this collection includes both Lord John and Outlander stories. It also has a story about Jamie and Ian Murray's time in France.
Finally, there is an Outlander crossover story called "Past Prologue" in the short story collection Match Up. In it, characters from Outlander interact with characters from the Cotton Malone novels by Steve Berry, who co-wrote the story with Gabaldon. It's not connected to Outlander, but there's also a story co-written by True Blood author Charlaine Harris in this collection, FYI.
This is a tricky one, because even though the new prequel series is based on characters that are spoken about in the books (Jamie's parents, Claire's parents), the events in the show are not based on a book, so to speak. Like, you can't go read a book that mirrors the episode and season structure of Blood of My Blood. So while we, as viewers and readers, know what happened to these characters eventually, their stories get a lot more detail in this series that we haven't heard or read about before.
