The Books

Worlds that open like a door in an empty field.

Every novel by Elin Halden begins with a threshold. Available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.

INSIDIA

2026 • Novel

One of them is lying.

Natalie Hall has spent twelve years holding her family together. She gave up her engineering degree at nineteen, and she has never once said so out loud. Then she lands the job — executive secretary to Ryan Thompson, arrogant, impossible, and the first man in her life who listens when she talks about buildings. In eleven weeks she goes from taking minutes to being named in a boardroom, on a four-hundred-million-dollar bid. Her sister Susan has been kind lately. Breakfast on the table. Laundry folded. Someone waiting up. At the company party, Susan calls from the lobby: she's sick, she needs a hospital. Natalie is gone ninety minutes. What she finds when she comes back costs her the job, the man, and every version of her family she believed in — and by the time she starts over inside her enemy's company, the lie has grown a due date. Ryan doesn't remember that night. Susan remembers every second of it.

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NORNLESS

2026 • Novel

A Norse Romantasy — The Wergild Cycle, Book One.

A life is owed. A life will be paid. When Halvar Ravnsson's brother is murdered and the guilty house has no silver to settle the blood-debt, they offer something else in its place: a woman torn out of another world. Under the law she is payment — his until she dies, or until he frees her, and freeing her would reopen the feud and starve the sixty people he keeps alive through a winter that has not broken in three years. Nell went to work on an ordinary morning. Now she is property, in a country where any stranger can read a person's fate in their face. Except hers. Nell has no thread. The Norns never spun her. No seer can read her, no oath can hold her, no god can find her — and in a world that runs on prophecy and sworn word, the one woman who can lie without paying for it is the most dangerous thing alive. Kings want her. The caste that edits fate itself wants her. And Halvar, who swore to set her free, begins to dread the day he has to keep his word. She was dragged across worlds to settle someone else's debt. But when an ancient power offers Nell the chance to save a dying world — at the price of ceasing to exist — she discovers she has spent her whole life believing the wrong lie about herself. Not that she was worth nothing.

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THE NAME THE FIRE FORGOT

2026 • Novel

A city of flame. A girl without a name. A sacrifice no one remembers.

Alba Severo Gullveig is two days shy of her eighteenth birthday when she discovers that the boarding school where she grew up was not chosen to educate her — but to hide her. Her mother is not dead. She is trapped in Lasaia, a city kept alive by a flame that consumes names and erases, from the minds of the living, the paths leading to those they once loved. When shadow-creatures invade Westmere through the mirrors, Alba is dragged into this other world by Vali, a captain bound by a magical oath that can turn his own body against his will. In Lasaia, everyone seems to know who Alba is meant to be: the heir to a dead queen, the key to the flame, perhaps the only weapon capable of saving the city. But as she draws closer to her mother and the truth behind Banshee — the woman who rules the forgotten — Alba realizes that every promise of protection concealed someone's sacrifice. To restore the names without handing the power to possess them to a single person, she must confront the story written for her, discover the extent to which she can trust Vali, and decide whether home is the place that waited for her, the people who lied to keep her alive, or the future she dares to build with her own name.

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WHAT REMAINS

2026 • Novel

The man she loved is gone. His face remains.

At twenty-six, Kate Mitchell learns that grief has a sound. It is the coffee maker brewing enough for two in an empty house. It is the silence on the other side of the bed. It is everyone telling her that life will go on when she cannot imagine wanting it to. A week earlier, Kate had a husband, a home, and a future filled with ordinary promises. Then Richard left for a construction site one Sunday morning and never came back. His death is called a tragic accident, but Kate cannot stop thinking about the final promise he made before walking out the door: I'll be home for lunch. Before she has even begun to understand how to live without him, Richard's uncle arrives with another blow. Kate has inherited her husband's place within Mitchell's Corporation, the powerful New York company his family built — and the world Richard spent years keeping away from her. Kate goes to New York because protecting what Richard left behind feels easier than accepting that he is gone. Then she meets Ryan. Richard's twin has her husband's eyes, his voice, and the face she believed she would never see again. But Ryan is not Richard. He is colder, angrier, and carrying a grief of his own — one he refuses to share with the widow who already despises him. Looking at Ryan hurts. Wanting to look again feels like a betrayal. But as Kate is drawn deeper into the Mitchell family, troubling questions begin to surface. The elevator that killed Richard should never have fallen. Someone tampered with its safety systems. Hidden documents reveal payments Richard had been tracing before his death, and an anonymous warning follows Kate to New York: Don't make us bury another Mitchell. The closer she gets to the truth, the more Kate realizes that Richard had kept secrets from everyone — including her. To discover who killed him, she must uncover the parts of her husband's life he never brought home. And somewhere between mourning the man she lost and learning to see the man who shares his face, Kate will have to confront a truth even more frightening than murder: Loving Richard was easy. Learning how to live after him may cost her everything that remains.

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