Eight books about a twelve-year-old criminal mastermind who starts the series by kidnapping a fairy and ends it somewhere entirely different. The Kindle editions are the problem: most of them do not carry a number anywhere on the cover or in the title, so “the next one” is genuinely hard to work out from a store listing.
Here is the order, which is not the same as the order the store sorts them into.
The short answer
Start with Artemis Fowl and read the eight below in the order listed. Watch out for two in particular: The Lost Colony is book five and The Time Paradox is book six, and several listings have them the other way round because of when the ebook editions were published.
Do you have to read them in order?
Yes. Artemis himself is the plot. He begins as a genuine villain — cold, greedy, entirely willing to hurt people — and the series is the long, uneven business of him becoming someone else. Read out of order that arc just looks like inconsistent characterization, and the running cast of Holly, Butler, Foaly and Mulch all carry history forward from book to book.
The other reason is that Colfer keeps raising the stakes. Book one is a siege at a country house. Book eight is not. Skipping the middle makes the ending feel unearned.
Every Artemis Fowl book in order
- Artemis Fowl
- Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident
- Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code
- Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception
- Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony
- Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox
- Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex
- Artemis Fowl, Book 8: The Last Guardian
The companion volume
The Artemis Fowl Files collects two short stories plus interviews, fairy-alphabet material and background on the LEP. It sits naturally after book three. It is optional — nothing in the main run depends on it — but it is the right thing to hand a reader who has finished the series and wants more of the world rather than more of the plot.
The graphic novels
The first four books have graphic novel adaptations, and they are adaptations rather than continuations — no new story, and they stop well short of book eight. They work as a way in for a reader who finds the prose dense, but anyone who takes to them will have to switch to the novels at book five regardless.
A note on age
This one skews a little older than its shelf placement suggests. There are guns, a body count, and a protagonist whose plans involve real harm to people who have not wronged him. It reads best around eleven to thirteen. Younger readers who love the premise often do better starting with the graphic novels.
Keep browsing
Every book above has a page in our catalog. If the appeal is a clever child running rings around adults, see books like Harry Potter and mysteries for tweens. For more in the same register, our fantasy books for tweens list picks up several of the same readers.