What Order Should You Read Pierce Brown's Red Rising In?

The search term that keeps bringing people to us is Red Rising reading order, and it is a fair question. Pierce Brown has built a sprawling story across several books, and the series does not always arrive on shelves in the order you might expect to read it. If you are picking up Red Rising for the first time, here is a clear, spoiler-light route through the books we track, so you start in the right place.

The Red Rising saga is really two trilogies that sit inside one larger story. The first run begins with Red Rising itself, continues with Golden Son, and closes with Morning Star. Once that trio is done, the story picks up again with Iron Gold, Dark Age, and Light Bringer, which form a second arc rather than a separate series.

Reading them in publication order gets you through the story in the sequence Pierce Brown wrote it, which also happens to be the sequence that makes the most sense for new readers. There is no need to hunt for a different "correct" order: the books were written to be read one after another, trilogy by trilogy.

Based on the titles and publication years we hold for Pierce Brown, the order runs like this:

1. Red Rising (Deluxe Slipcase Edition), first published 2014 2. Golden Son, first published 2015 3. Morning Star 4. Iron Gold, first published 2018 5. Dark Age, first published 2019 6. Light Bringer, first published 2023

We do not have a confirmed first publication year for Morning Star, so we have left the date out rather than guess at it. The order above is still right: it is the third book in the original trilogy, sitting between Golden Son and Iron Gold.

Pierce Brown also contributed to From a Certain Point of View, a Star Wars anthology with contributions from many different writers. It is not part of the Red Rising timeline and does not need to be read alongside the main sequence. If you are a Star Wars reader as well as a Red Rising one, it is worth knowing about, but new readers starting the saga can safely leave it for later. As with Morning Star, we do not have a confirmed first publication year for this title, so none is given here.

While you are waiting on the next Red Rising instalment, there are plenty of other releases moving through our tracking lists in the weeks ahead. If you read widely across science fiction and fantasy, a few worth a look include The Best of Adrian Tchaikovsky, due 3 December 2026, and The Moth Reborn by Samantha Shannon, due 18 February 2027. Readers who lean towards fantasy adventure might also want Emily Wilde's History of Dark Faerie, due 19 January 2027.

None of these are part of the Red Rising story, but they give a sense of what else is coming if you are building out a reading list alongside Pierce Brown's books. You can always check the full picture across genres on our releases page.

Pierce Brown's trilogies have a habit of landing with a wait in between, which makes it easy to lose track of exactly when the next book is due. Bleepia exists to solve that one problem: we alert you the day a new book by an author you follow is out, so you are not left relying on memory or guesswork.

If you want that alert sent straight to your inbox, you can follow your authors and add Pierce Brown to your list, or create a free account to get started. Either way, the next time a Red Rising book appears, you will hear about it from us on day one rather than stumbling across it weeks later.