Why we’re excited
Emily Wilde has spent three books cataloguing the Folk, and this time she goes looking for the one place they are afraid of. A missing friend draws her into Germany's Black Forest, where the trail leads toward a sealed-off kingdom she calls Dark Faerie. Her husband Wendell and young Ariadne also get chapters of their own.
This is book four. Heather Fawcett built the series on footnoted field journals and a heroine who prefers bogles to people. Start with Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries if you haven't met her yet; the marriage and the throne plot make far more sense in order.
On our most-anticipated list since 21 October 2026. See all the most anticipated books →
What to know about Emily Wilde’s History of Dark Faerie
Emily Wilde’s History of Dark Faerie is Book 4 in the Emily Wilde series. New readers should begin with Book 1, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries (we have reviewed it). The book just before this one is Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales, also reviewed on The Bookish Elf. 3 of the 4 books in the series have a full review here.
We have reviewed 4 of Heather Fawcett’s books, with an average score of 4.3 out of 5. The one we rated highest is Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales (4.5★); the most recent is Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter.
It sits at No. 6 on our January 2027 most-anticipated list, which ranks the month's books by how many readers have saved them.
From the publisher
Curmudgeonly scholar Emily Wilde must brave the beautiful but haunted Black Forest and open a portal to a long-lost, eldritch realm dreaded by the Folk, in this fourth installment of the New York Times bestselling series.
Driven by an insatiable scientific curiosity, Emily Wilde has made a name for herself as the world’s foremost scholar of faeries. Along the way, she’s rescued a faerie kingdom and helped her now-husband—fellow professor Wendell Bambleby, dashing and infuriating in equal measure—regain his throne. And while understanding her fellow mortals has never been her strong suit, she’s also made a small number of friends.
But two years later, one of those friends goes missing in the beautiful but faerie-haunted Black Forest in Germany, a region of picturesque villages and sinister Folk. And if she’s to save him, Emily will have to reckon with the darker side of her own nature, and how ruthless she’s prepared to be to solve the most tantalizing of scholarly mysteries: the history of the ancient and long-lost realm she’s named Dark Faerie, the only place the Folk fear.
But Emily is not alone—she has her beloved Wendell, and her niece Ariadne, who hopes to follow in her footsteps. Told from the perspective of all three characters, this installment of the Emily Wilde series opens a magical portal to the most wondrous and dread faerie realm of all.
Description supplied by the publisher.
We haven’t read Emily Wilde’s History of Dark Faerie yet. When our review goes up, it will replace this page.
