Guide

The Wheel of Time reading order

Updated 1 October 2026

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time in publication order, including where the prequel sits and who finished the last three books.

The Wheel of Time is one long story. Start at The Eye of the World. Read forward in publication order until you reach the end. New Spring is a prequel. It is not book one, and reading it first spoils the early books' sense of discovery. A common suggestion among readers is to slot New Spring in after Lord of Chaos. That is a suggestion, not an instruction Jordan issued. Publication order places New Spring later, between Crossroads of Twilight and Knife of Dreams.

Robert Jordan died in 2007. Brandon Sanderson finished the last three books from Jordan's notes and outlines. Knife of Dreams, published on 11 October 2005, is the last book Jordan himself finished. The Gathering Storm (2009), Towers of Midnight (2 November 2010), and A Memory of Light (2013) are the three Sanderson completions. They are still the end of this series, and they belong in that order.

Publication order

Dates below follow Wikipedia's Wheel of Time bibliography. The Eye of the World card uses an ISBN checked on Open Library. The other books are title-and-author links, so an unverified barcode is not presented as a fact.

How to keep your place

These books are long, and households often own a mix of paperback volumes and later combined editions. Write down the title you finished, not only a volume number, because different publishers split the early books differently in some markets. If you set a book down for a year, the title is the bookmark that still works.

You do not have to buy the whole set to begin. The Eye of the World is the test. If you want to continue, The Great Hunt is next. Box sets are convenient only when you already know you will read them. They are an expensive way to own book twelve before you have finished book two.

People argue about the middle books, especially the stretch around Crossroads of Twilight. You can listen to those arguments after you have read the books, if you still care. A reading-order page should not talk you out of the order the story was written in. Skip none of the main sequence if you want the ending to land.

Maps, art books, and companion guides are not the next novel after A Memory of Light. They can be pleasant, and they are easy to buy by mistake when a shop files everything with the same logo in one tub. If your list already has the fifteen titles above, you are not missing a hidden volume in the story. You may still be missing a physical copy, which is a different problem and exactly what a shelf record is for. Check title by title. The prequel's title, New Spring, is the one people mis-file as book one because the word spring sounds like a beginning.

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